Introduction – Why SAP BTP Cost Overruns Are Common
Many companies are caught off guard by high SAP BTP bills without a big increase in workload. Why? Because overspend on BTP rarely comes from growth – it comes from silence.
Idle services, forgotten runtimes, and untracked credit usage quietly drain budgets in the background. SAP BTP’s pay-per-use model is powerful but unforgiving: it won’t stop charging you just because a system is idle or a project ended.
The platform’s default settings assume continuous usage, and SAP isn’t going to auto-suspend your services when you’re not looking.
In short, the onus is on you to actively manage and govern your BTP resources, or risk paying for tech horsepower you aren’t actually using.
This guide highlights the most common SAP BTP cost pitfalls and how to avoid them. Each pitfall is based on real-world scenarios where BTP costs ballooned unexpectedly.
We’ll pair each hidden cost trap with practical fixes – from governance policies and automation to contract safeguards – so you can keep your cloud budget under control.
Read our complete guide for SAP BTP Licensing & Cost Control: Managing Your SAP Cloud Platform Costs.
Common SAP BTP Cost Pitfalls – And How to Avoid Them
Pitfall #1 – Always-On Runtimes (Kyma, Cloud Foundry, Integration Suite)
The Problem: Cloud runtimes on SAP BTP (e.g., Kyma Kubernetes clusters, Cloud Foundry app spaces, or Integration Suite tenants) often run 24/7 by default. Developers spin up these environments for projects or testing and then leave them running even when idle. Since BTP services don’t automatically shut down, an unused dev system can keep consuming vCPUs, memory, and credits around the clock.
Why It Happens: BTP’s design prioritizes availability – once a runtime is activated, it keeps running unless someone intervenes. There’s no built-in timeout. It’s easy to forget a test cluster running over the weekend or after a project ends. SAP’s pricing model will happily bill those hours; there’s little incentive for SAP to provide auto-suspend by default.
Impact: Even a single idle runtime can burn hundreds or thousands of euros in a month with zero value gained. For example, a small Kyma cluster (say three nodes of 2 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM each) costs roughly 500 credits (~€500) per month if it runs nonstop. A Cloud Foundry app with 1 GB of memory might cost ~72 credits per month; ten such apps left on could consume ~720 credits (€720) monthly. These numbers add up fast. One customer found a forgotten training environment that had been idle for 3 months – it depleted several thousand euros from their credit pool before anyone noticed.
How to Avoid It: Treat non-production runtimes as ephemeral. Implement strict policies and automation to suspend or shut down environments when they’re not needed. Proven tactics include:
- Auto-Scheduling: Configure automatic shutdown for dev/test systems after business hours. For instance, turn off development clusters at 8 PM and restart at 8 AM. Simple scripts or BTP’s automation tools can schedule this, cutting runtime hours by ~50% weekly (saving half the cost).
- Idle Timeout: Enforce auto-suspend for any runtime with no activity for a certain period (e.g. 1 hour of no requests). If a service isn’t being used, it should automatically sleep to stop the meter.
- Resource Tags & Owners: Tag every runtime or service instance with an owner and expiry date. Owners get notified before the resource is auto-stopped or deleted. An expiry date ensures temporary environments don’t live forever.
- Cloud FinOps Tools: Use BTP Cockpit and external tools to monitor running resources. Set up alerts for any non-prod system running beyond approved hours or over a cost threshold.
Example Governance Policy: “All non-production BTP runtimes must be scheduled to auto-stop at 8 PM local time.” By mandating daily shutdowns for dev and test, you eliminate a large chunk of wasted runtime hours. In practice, companies that automate off-hours shutdown see immediate cost drops with no impact on developers (who rarely work at 3 AM). The goal is to never pay for a sleeping environment. If it’s not serving users, turn it off.
How to choose a consumption model, SAP BTP Subscription vs Pay-As-You-Go: Choosing the Right Model for Your Cloud Strategy.
Pitfall #2 – Unused or Forgotten Services
The Problem: It’s common to enable various BTP services for a proof-of-concept or initial test and then forget about them. Services like Workflow, Business Rules, Data Intelligence, or others might be activated (provisioned) in a subaccount and never actually used in production. Even if you’re not actively using them, simply leaving these services “ON” can incur baseline costs or at least consume part of your committed resources.
Why It Happens: Projects often experiment with new services. But there’s rarely a cleanup phase if the project is canceled or the pilot ends. Since the service is already enabled and may only be visible to that team, it remains in the account indefinitely. SAP BTP doesn’t nag you about unused services – they just quietly sit there, possibly drawing small charges or tying up capacity that could be freed.
Impact: At minimum, forgotten services clutter your landscape and complicate your cost tracking. In worst cases, they accrue ongoing costs. Some BTP services allocate a fixed amount of capacity when active – meaning you might be paying for a block of resources even with zero workload. Unused services also block credit optimization: for example, you might maintain a reserved instance that prevents you from using those credits elsewhere more effectively.
Over a year, a handful of neglected services can waste tens of thousands in the budget. It’s like paying rent for an empty house.
How to Avoid It: Institute a regular audit and decommission process:
- Monthly Subaccount Audits: Every month, review each BTP subaccount for active services with no recent usage. Identify services that haven’t processed data or users in, say, 60+ days. BTP’s usage dashboards or logs can help spot services with zero activity.
- Deactivate What’s Idle: If a service shows no activity for over 2 months and isn’t in use, shut it down. Don’t just assume “it might be needed later” – you can always re-enable it when truly needed. It’s more cost-effective to deprovision and later recreate a service than to hold it and pay for nothing.
- Project Closure Checklist: Make “service deactivation” a mandatory step in closing any project or pilot. When a test phase ends, the project manager should confirm which BTP services can be turned off. Having a checklist ensures this isn’t overlooked in the rush to finish a project.
- Confirmation of No Dependencies: Before deleting, double-check that no other applications or users are tied to the service. This can be part of the checklist – e.g. “Confirm no productive app depends on this instance.”
- Archive Configurations: If you plan to revisit the service later, export or document the configuration, then shut it down to reduce costs. You can keep templates or scripts to recreate it quickly if needed.
Checklist for Cleanup:
- Identify services with zero activity for 60+ days (e.g., no calls, no users, no data processed).
- Verify dependencies – ensure nothing will break if the service is removed.
- Delete or suspend the service instance if not truly needed.
- Document any important configuration before removal (for future reference).
By regularly pruning unused services, one enterprise freed up 15% of its BTP credits that were previously locked in dormant resources. The key is to view every running service as a line-item on your bill – if it’s not delivering value this month, consider turning it off.
Pitfall #3 – Over-Provisioning SAP HANA Cloud Databases
The Problem: Many BTP customers oversize their SAP HANA Cloud databases in an attempt to ensure performance safety. They’ll provision a large amount of memory (and CPU) “just in case” future growth demands it.
The mistake is assuming you only pay for what you use. In reality, you pay for the size you provision, not the actual usage. If you allocate a 256 GB in-memory HANA instance but only use 50 GB of data, you’re still paying for 256 GB of in-memory computing 24/7.
Why It Happens: HANA is an in-memory database, and performance-conscious teams tend to err on the side of extra capacity. SAP’s own sizing tools might suggest a high memory footprint, or architects think they need headroom for peak loads.
There’s also a legacy mindset from on-premise: buy bigger hardware to future-proof. In the cloud, that mentality leads to overspending, because cloud capacity is elastic (you can scale up later), but oversizing upfront racks up immediate costs. Plus, some may not realize the billing model charges per allocated GB-hour, not per actual data stored.
Impact: Over-provisioning HANA can be one of the costliest mistakes on BTP. HANA Cloud is priced in capacity units based on memory (and some CPU/storage). A small HANA instance (say 30 GB) might consume only a few credits per hour. But a large 256 GB instance could consume dozens of credits per hour.
Over a month, that difference is dramatic: a large HANA DB left running all month can burn several thousand credits (several thousand euros) even if the DB is mostly idle.
We’ve seen cases where a company reserved far more HANA memory than their workload needed – utilization was under 20%, meaning 80% of their spend was pure waste. Large reserved capacity wastes credits whenever utilization is low. Every extra GB of memory you don’t use is money down the drain.
How to Avoid It: Right-size and scale HANA Cloud intelligently:
- Start Small, Scale Up: Provision HANA with the minimum resources that meet your current needs, not an imagined future need. It’s easy to add more memory or CPU later with a few clicks. This way, you’re not paying upfront for capacity that sits idle. Remember, SAP charges for memory allocated, not memory used – so keep allocation as tight as possible.
- Use Usage Metrics: Continuously monitor the actual utilization of your HANA databases. BTP provides metrics on memory usage, CPU load, etc. If you see that your 128 GB HANA instance is only ever using 40 GB of memory, that’s a red flag – you can likely downgrade to a 64 GB instance and save a huge chunk of cost.
- Elastic Scaling Features: Leverage any elastic or auto-scaling features SAP HANA Cloud offers. For example, some editions allow adding burst CPU or temporarily scaling memory for a heavy task, then scaling down. Use this instead of running at max size all the time.
- Non-Prod Efficiency: Apply the same logic to non-production HANA instances (dev/test). Do they really need to mirror production size? If not, give them minimal sizes (or use HANA Cloud’s smaller service plans for dev). And shut them down when not in use, especially after hours or on weekends. A turned-off HANA instance isn’t accruing hourly charges.
- Architect for Cost: Consider using cheaper storage tiers for cold data. HANA Cloud offers a disk-based relational data lake or cheaper extension nodes for warm data that don’t cost as much as hot in-memory storage. Don’t keep archival data in expensive in-memory tables. By offloading rarely-used data to cheaper storage, you can reduce the memory footprint required, and thus the cost.
Best Practice: “Start small and scale up — SAP charges you for memory allocated, not memory used.” In practice, this means if you think you need 128 GB, maybe start with 64 GB and see if that suffices.
It’s far easier to justify adding capacity later (when usage proves the need) than to explain to your CFO why you paid for 10x more database than you actually utilized. Optimize continuously: rightsizing HANA Cloud can easily slash your BTP costs while still meeting performance needs.
Read how to optimize BTPs, Optimizing SAP BTP Usage: Practical Strategies to Cut SAP Cloud Costs
Pitfall #4 – Uncontrolled API Consumption (Integration Suite, Event Mesh)
The Problem: SAP BTP’s integration services (like Integration Suite, API Management, Event Mesh, etc.) often charge based on usage – typically API calls, messages, or events processed. Without strict controls, integrations or applications can call APIs at high frequency or even get stuck in loops, generating massive transaction volumes.
If your interfaces aren’t carefully configured or throttled, you can accidentally send millions of calls or messages. BTP will happily process them and deduct credits for each one. Uncontrolled API or message consumption can skyrocket your costs overnight.
Why It Happens: Integrations are often “set and forget.” Developers might not realize that an inefficient polling interface or a misconfigured retry loop is hitting an API thousands of times per hour. There’s also a tendency to not implement rate limits internally because “the cloud service should handle it.”
Moreover, SAP’s tiered pricing for messages means initial usage might be cheap, lulling teams into a false sense of security – until volumes spike. And crucially, BTP imposes no hard stop on usage. If an interface goes rogue on a Friday night, it might run unchecked all weekend. By the time someone notices, the credit pool is drained. SAP’s model won’t stop you from overspending; it’s up to you to put guardrails.
Impact: Unthrottled APIs or message flows can consume huge chunks of credits in a short time. For example, SAP Integration Suite might charge roughly ~€6 per 10,000 messages at a base rate (and less at higher volumes). That means an extra 1,000,000 messages will cost around €600 (600 credits) if you blow past your included quota.
There have been real incidents: a retailer had an integration error that triggered millions of redundant messages over a weekend. By Monday, it had tripled their monthly credit burn, incurring tens of thousands of euros in unplanned charges.
Another scenario is APIs being continuously hit by a bug or unauthorized access, racking up transaction costs without delivering value. These kinds of events can wipe out your committed credits quickly and even lead to expensive overage bills at the list price.
How to Avoid It: Enforce strict controls and monitoring on all integration and API usage:
- Enable Throttling: Use the throttling features in SAP Integration Suite and API Management. Set maximum call rates for each interface. For example, if an API should realistically be called at most 1000 times/hour, enforce that. This prevents runaway scenarios.
- Quotas Per App: Implement quota limits per consumer or application. BTP allows you to define service quotas in some cases. If one app starts using abnormally high calls, it will hit its quota and stop, rather than draining everything.
- Monitor Message Volume: Check the BTP Cockpit usage metrics for Integration Suite at least weekly (if not daily). Set up custom alerts for unusual spikes – e.g. if message count in a day exceeds a threshold or if one interface suddenly sends 10x its normal traffic.
- Audit Logs: Regularly audit integration flow logs and event logs for errors or retries. A common cause of overspending is an integration flow error that keeps retrying or sending failure notifications in a loop. Catch those patterns early via log monitoring.
- Optimize Interfaces: Design integrations to be efficient. Avoid chatty interactions when a batch would do. For instance, instead of calling an API 1000 times for 1000 records, have one call that processes all 1000 if possible. Reducing call counts directly reduces cost.
- Test with Volume in Mind: When building new interfaces, test them under load and monitor the cost impact. It’s better to discover in testing that an interface would send 1 million messages than to find out in production. Adjust the design before going live if an interface is too talkative.
Tip: “Set upper limits — BTP won’t stop you from burning credits, but your governance should.” In practice, this means configuring not just soft alerts but also hard stops where possible.
For example, some companies script an automatic cut-off: if credit consumption for Integration Suite exceeds a monthly cap, new integrations are temporarily paused or an alert is escalated immediately.
While you might not want to halt critical processes, having safety valves ensures a rogue process doesn’t run wild unchecked. Ultimately, proactive monitoring and smart limits will save you from nasty invoice surprises.
Pitfall #5 – Lack of Credit Governance and Alerts
The Problem: Many organizations treat their cloud credits like a black box – they only find out how much was used when the monthly report or invoice arrives. In SAP BTP’s Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) model, you pre-pay for a pool of credits and then consume them.
Without active governance, teams might not realize how fast they’re burning through credits until it’s too late. Lack of timely alerts and regular review means overspend isn’t caught early. By the time someone notices (often Finance, when the bill comes), the damage is done.
Why It Happens: Governance processes might not be in place yet for a new BTP adoption. SAP’s default tooling will show you usage, but it’s up to the customer to set threshold alerts – not everyone does this. IT teams may assume Finance is watching, and Finance assumes IT has it under control, resulting in no one actively monitoring day-to-day consumption. Also, companies may not assign clear responsibility for cloud cost monitoring (is it the SAP Basis team? a FinOps team? procurement?). This gap means credit usage falls into a blind spot.
Impact: A lack of governance is like having no fuel gauge on a car – you only know you’re out of gas when the engine stops. In BTP terms, you might blow through 100% of your annual credits six months into the year without warning.
Then, new consumption is either charged as an expensive overage or certain projects grind to a halt. We’ve seen cases where a team unknowingly used nearly all their credits in a quarter, leaving nothing for the rest of the year.
The finance department was shocked by a huge overage invoice because no alerts were set at 50% or 80% consumption. Budget overruns and emergency true-up purchases are the result. Essentially, credit pool depletion can catch everyone off guard and lead to panicked cost-cutting or scrapping planned initiatives to stay within budget.
How to Avoid It: Establish robust credit monitoring and early warning systems, involving both IT and Finance:
- Set Threshold Alerts: In the SAP BTP Cockpit, configure automated alerts for when your credit consumption reaches key thresholds (e.g., 50%, 75%, 90% of your committed credits). Make sure these alerts trigger in time to act – getting a warning at 90% allows little room, so earlier thresholds like 50% and 75% are critical for proactive management.
- Multi-Team Notifications: Ensure those alerts are sent to a broad audience, including the IT operations team, the project owner, and Finance controllers. Everyone should get visibility when consumption is high. This avoids the scenario where IT blows the budget and Finance only learns later (or vice versa).
- Monthly Consumption Reports: Don’t wait for quarterly reviews. Do a monthly (or even bi-weekly) consumption review. Break down credits used by service and by subaccount. This can be a short meeting between technical and finance stakeholders to spot trends. For example, if one subaccount’s usage jumps significantly in a month, you can investigate why and take action if needed.
- Track by Cost Center: If possible, tag or allocate each subaccount or service to a cost center or project. This way you can hold specific owners accountable. “Project X used 300 credits last month.” – Is that expected? If not, talk to that team. Internal chargeback reports often reveal idle services or inefficient usage that would otherwise go unnoticed.
- Use External FinOps Tools: Consider using cloud cost management tools that support SAP BTP, or even simple dashboards, to consolidate usage data. These tools can often forecast when you’ll run out of credits based on your current burn rate. Forecasting can trigger a warning like “at this pace, you’ll exhaust your credits by October”. That insight lets you adjust course earlier.
Policy Example: “Finance must be alerted when BTP consumption reaches 80% of committed credits.” This kind of policy ensures that the people holding the purse strings are never in the dark.
No CIO or CFO likes surprises. By formally requiring threshold alerts (and actions when thresholds are hit, such as usage reviews or a spend freeze on non-essentials), you create a safety net. Good governance means cost issues are identified while they can still be corrected – not after the money is spent.
Pitfall #6 – Shadow Accounts and Poor Role Governance
The Problem: In large organizations, it’s easy for different teams to create their own SAP BTP subaccounts or even separate global accounts without central oversight. This often happens in the name of speed or autonomy – a department wants to try out BTP, so they spin up an account with a credit card or using spare licenses.
The result is shadow IT within BTP: multiple disconnected accounts, redundant services, and no single view of usage. Without a centralized governance of who can create accounts or enable services, costs can proliferate in silos.
Why It Happens: SAP BTP’s ease of access (especially with Pay-As-You-Go options or free trials converting to paid) means any enthusiastic developer or project team can start using it. If the organization lacks a policy that all cloud services must go through central IT, you’ll get fragmented BTP usage.
Additionally, even within an official BTP global account, a lack of role governance can lead to dozens of subaccounts being created for every little project, environment, or team whim. With no tagging or owner assignment, these subaccounts fly under the radar. There might be no process to periodically review and consolidate them.
Impact: Shadow accounts lead to duplicate costs and wasted spend. Imagine two teams, each creating a sandbox subaccount and activating the same service (say, a 32 GB HANA instance) for testing. They are paying twice for something that could potentially have been shared or centralized. Also, separate accounts might not benefit from volume discounts or committed credits if they’re outside the enterprise agreement.
In one scenario, a line-of-business opened a standalone BTP account on a credit card and racked up a few thousand euros in charges – meanwhile, the central IT’s BTP enterprise account had plenty of unused credits that year. That’s pure inefficiency: they paid retail rates out of one budget while leaving prepaid capacity unused in another.
Moreover, without central visibility, no one notices these redundant environments. It’s possible to have “rogue” subaccounts running up bills for months. Poor role governance (letting anyone enable expensive services) also means a junior developer could accidentally provision a large, costly resource (like a 64 GB HANA or a high-tier AI service) without approval, incurring huge costs before it’s caught.
How to Avoid It: Regain central control over account creation and enforce accountability for every environment:
- Centralize Account Management: Treat SAP BTP like any other enterprise platform – there should be one central owner of the BTP landscape (typically IT or a Cloud Center of Excellence). All new subaccounts must be created through a controlled process (for example, via a request to the central team). This prevents random ad-hoc accounts.
- Single Global Account Strategy: Ideally, use a single Global Account (enterprise agreement) with multiple subaccounts for projects, rather than multiple unrelated BTP contracts. This way, all usage draws from the same credit pool (maximizing your committed discount) and is visible in one place. Eliminate any shadow Pay-As-You-Go accounts by migrating their work into the central account.
- Assign Budget Owners: For every subaccount that is created, assign a responsible owner or cost center. This person/team is accountable for the spend in that subaccount. If the subaccount is for Project Y, then Project Y’s manager knows the budget impact. This prevents the “no accountability” syndrome.
- Tag and Label: Use BTP’s tagging/labeling features to label subaccounts by environment type (dev/test/prod) and project. This helps in reporting and also in identifying which ones might be redundant (e.g., you find 5 different “test” subaccounts for similar purposes).
- Regular Cleanup & Merge: Conduct a quarterly (or at least biannual) cleanup exercise. Identify redundant or inactive subaccounts – especially those created for temporary purposes. Deactivate and delete what’s no longer needed. If multiple small dev/test subaccounts could be consolidated into one shared sandbox, consolidate them to reduce overhead.
- Role and Quota Governance: Limit who can activate new services or increase quotas. For instance, only the central admin should be able to enable a service plan at the global account level. This ensures no one spins up an expensive service without oversight. You can also set quota limits so that in dev subaccounts, only smaller service sizes are allowed (preventing someone from creating a massive HANA DB in a dev environment). Essentially, use technical guardrails to enforce cost policies.
Checklist:
- Inventory all subaccounts and identify owners. If any have no clear owner, assign one or consider shutting them down.
- Close or merge redundant subaccounts: (e.g., multiple sandboxes doing the same thing).
- Govern creation: New subaccounts require approval and must be tagged with project and owner.
- Review roles: Only authorized admins can approve costly resources. Remove excessive privileges from general users.
By eliminating shadow BTP usage and tying every cost to an owner, companies have significantly reduced duplicate spending.
One organization cut 20% of its BTP costs simply by consolidating test environments and shutting down five unneeded subaccounts. The mantra should be: No BTP account or service runs without someone accountable for its cost.
Pitfall #7 – No Contractual Controls on Credit Expiry
The Problem: SAP’s Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) for BTP works on prepaid credits that typically expire at the end of the contract term (often yearly). If you don’t use all your credits within the year, they vanish – you lose them.
Many companies sign a contract, receive a pool of credits, and then discover too late that they have a large amount left unused at year-end, which can’t be carried forward. Without negotiating protections, any unused cloud credits become worthless once the period is over, resulting in lost money.
Why It Happens: It’s partly an outcome of sales and optimism. Customers often over-commit to credits to get a better discount or because they expected more projects to use BTP. But not all plans pan out in time – projects are delayed or usage ramps up more slowly, leaving credits on the table. If the contract doesn’t allow rollover, those credits expire.
SAP’s standard terms encourage a “use it or lose it” approach, which, frankly, incentivizes overspend or waste. Unless the customer is savvy enough to negotiate custom terms (like credit rollover or extensions), they might be stuck. Many assume they can just use leftover credits next year, only to find out that’s not allowed by default.
Impact: The financial impact is lost value and wasted budget. You’ve effectively paid for services you never used. Industry reports have highlighted this issue: an estimated 25% of purchased BTP credits go unused, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in lost value across SAP’s customer base.
Imagine committing $1 million to BTP and only using $750k – the remaining $250k is money straight down the drain if it expires. That could have funded other projects or been saved if planned better.
Companies have ended fiscal years with, say, 20% of their BTP investment unused and had to explain to leadership why they “wasted” that money. Additionally, those unused credits can’t typically be refunded or applied elsewhere after the fact (unless you have some one-off agreement). It’s a painful lesson in overbuying.
How to Avoid It: Tackle the issue at the contract stage and via proactive planning:
- Negotiate Rollover Clauses: Before signing your BTP contract (or at renewal), negotiate terms that protect against expiry. For example, ask for a rollover of unused credits into the next term, or a grace period. Even a partial rollover or a one-time extension can save a lot of value. If SAP wants your business, they may allow unspent Year 1 credits to carry into Year 2, etc., especially if you commit to larger multi-year deals.
- Offset/Conversion Rights: Another angle – negotiate the right to convert unused BTP credits into other SAP offerings or services. For instance, an offset clause could let you use unused credit values toward a different SAP invoice or future cloud services. It’s not standard, but some customers have had success asking for flexibility (e.g., “if by year-end we have leftover, can we apply it to a different SAP cloud service or roll into a future project?”). Get it in writing.
- Careful Initial Commitment: The best prevention is not overcommitting in the first place. Be realistic in your credit purchase. It’s better to slightly under-commit and then purchase a top-up if needed than to grossly overestimate and waste a chunk. Use forecasting tools and consider a ramp-up model (maybe fewer credits in Year 1, more in Year 2 as projects go live).
- Regular Usage Checkpoints: Throughout the year, monitor credit consumption against your commitment. If mid-year, you see you’ve only used 30% of your credits with 6 months left, that’s a huge warning. Accelerate adoption internally – find ways to use what you paid for (spin up that analytics project early, for example). Or, approach SAP early to discuss options: it’s better to have that conversation in month 9 than on day 365. Sometimes SAP might allow a one-time concession if approached proactively (e.g., extending the period a couple of months).
- Document Contract Terms: Make sure your team knows the exact rules of your contract. Believe it or not, some IT teams assume credits roll over because other vendors do, only to be shocked later. If your contract states that “credits expire after 12 months,” broadcast this internally and treat unused credits as expiring inventory that you must use or lose.
Example Clause to Include: “Unused CPEA credits may be rolled into the next fiscal period or used toward new BTP services within 12 months.” This kind of clause (if you can get it) explicitly allows you to carry over leftover credits or repurpose them.
It turns the “drop dead” expiry into a softer landing. Even if SAP only agrees to roll over a percentage (say 15% of unused credits) or requires the rollover to be used quickly, it’s still better than zero. The main point: don’t accept the default expiry without question. You have leverage before signing – use it to safeguard your investment.
Pitfall #8 – Lack of Visibility Across Teams
The Problem: Often, the people incurring BTP costs (developers, integration teams, etc.) are not the ones paying the bills (procurement or finance), and there’s poor visibility between them.
A development team might activate a pricey service or push heavy usage without anyone in procurement knowing to expect a spike. Conversely, procurement might have negotiated a great deal on credits, but individual teams aren’t aware of the limits and just use BTP freely.
This disconnect between technical teams and financial governance leads to uncoordinated usage and budget overruns with no clear accountability. In the worst case, separate teams treat BTP as a free-for-all, each thinking someone else is watching the bottom line.
Why It Happens: Silos in organizational structure are often to blame. IT might see BTP as a technical platform and not involve Finance in day-to-day decisions. Finance might trust IT to manage usage, but not have real-time data.
Additionally, SAP’s own tooling might reside only with the admin in IT, preventing other stakeholders from logging into the BTP cockpit to see consumption. There’s also the issue of enthusiasm: a department might jump on BTP to solve a problem (creating new apps, integrations, etc.) without involving central governance, assuming that if they have access, it’s fine to use it.
If approvals for service activations aren’t required, teams won’t naturally communicate their plans. Essentially, each team operates in a vacuum, and the first time everyone comes together is when reconciling the invoice.
Impact: Lack of cross-team visibility can cause budget shock and finger-pointing. For example, a development team could enable an expensive AI service or run thousands of test transactions, burning through credits, and Finance only finds out when the cost report arrives.
By then, that money is gone, and it wasn’t budgeted. A new project might consume far more BTP resources than expected, but since no one informed procurement, there’s no financial plan to cover it. This often results in internal blame: “Who authorized this spend?” “Why didn’t anyone tell us usage was so high?” It can also mean missed opportunities for efficiency: one team might be paying for something that another team already has the capacity for.
And as noted earlier, there can be cases where a department creates a separate BTP subscription (shadow IT) – not maliciously, but because they didn’t know there was an enterprise account or didn’t want to wait for central IT.
The enterprise then loses volume discounts and spends more overall. In summary, without a unified view, it’s impossible to control costs or optimize usage effectively. Money leaks through cracks between teams.
How to Avoid It: Break down the silos between technical and financial stakeholders when it comes to BTP usage:
- Establish a BTP Cost Governance Board: Create a cross-functional team or committee that oversees BTP consumption. Include representatives from IT (BTP admins or architects), Finance/FinOps, Procurement, and any major business units using BTP. This board should meet regularly (monthly or quarterly) to review usage and costs, approve major changes, and enforce policies. It ensures everyone has the same picture of BTP spend and value.
- Approval for High-Cost Actions: Require an approval process for any service activation or usage expected to exceed a certain credit threshold. For example, if a team wants to enable a service that could cost more than, say, €5,000 a month, that should go through a financial approval step. This doesn’t mean blocking innovation – it means large expenditures get visibility. A simple internal form or ticket that Finance signs off on can prevent surprises.
- Shared Dashboards: Implement a single cost dashboard for all BTP usage that all stakeholders can view. SAP’s cockpit can show usage by subaccount; export this data or use a third-party tool to create an easy-to-read dashboard (e.g., credits consumed vs credits remaining, by team). Publish this dashboard or send it out regularly. When everyone sees the same numbers, there’s less room for ignorance.
- Communication and Training: Educate development and project teams about the cost model. Ensure they understand that “using BTP isn’t free” and that they should consider the cost impact as part of their design. Sometimes devs simply aren’t aware how much something costs because nobody told them. Establish channels for teams to ask, “Hey, we plan to do X with BTP, about how many credits will that use?” – and get guidance before they do it.
- Centralize Budget Responsibility: Ultimately, someone needs to own the BTP budget. Whether it’s central IT or a FinOps manager, assign clear ownership. That person/team tracks overall spend and works with others to stay within budget. They can also enforce that any new significant use of BTP is accounted for (e.g., if a line of business wants to launch a new BTP-based app, they must coordinate with this owner to ensure credits are available or budgeted).
- Periodic Cost Reviews with Teams: Don’t make cost discussions a taboo with technical folks. Every quarter (if not monthly), have a brief review with each team using BTP: “Here’s what you spent, here’s what that means. Any big usage planned next quarter? Let’s budget for it.” This encourages accountability and proactive planning across teams.
By ensuring visibility and shared responsibility, you transform cost control from a reactive blame game to a proactive team effort. In practice, one enterprise instituted a cloud cost council that caught an upcoming project’s plan to use heavy BTP resources – they adjusted the plan before it launched, saving an estimated €100k in potential overages.
The key is that no BTP usage happens in a corner. Finance, procurement, and IT all stay in the loop, so there are no nasty surprises.
Governance Framework for Cost Prevention
Stopping cost overruns in SAP BTP isn’t just about fixing individual issues – it requires an overarching governance framework.
The following measures create a safety net that addresses all the pitfalls holistically:
- BTP Cost Governance Policy: Develop a formal policy that defines how BTP resources are requested, used, and monitored. This policy should include rules like mandatory shutdown schedules, approval requirements for costly services, tagging standards, and alert thresholds. Having these rules in writing sets clear expectations enterprise-wide.
- Regular Consumption Audits: Conduct monthly audits of BTP usage per subaccount (as mentioned earlier). This means reviewing the bill or usage report in detail: which services consumed how many credits, are there spikes or idle resources? Treat it like a cloud “health check” for cost. This recurring audit catches issues early (like an idle service left on or a sudden cost spike in one area).
- Assign Service Owners & Budget Accountability: Every active service or application running on BTP should have an owner responsible for its cost and upkeep. For example, if you have an SAP Data Warehouse Cloud instance, assign it to the analytics team lead, who is accountable for its cost efficiency. The third part of the project owners’ KPIs is staying within budget. When people know they are accountable, they pay more attention to turning things off and optimizing size.
- Quarterly Forecast & Review: Forecast your credit burn for the upcoming quarter and review how it went for the last quarter. Update the forecast with any changes (new projects, increased user counts, etc.). This practice keeps you aligned with your committed credits. If you see a potential overshoot or underspend, you can act (either by adjusting usage or talking to SAP).
- Integrate FinOps Reporting: Make BTP costs part of your broader cloud FinOps dashboards. If your company uses tools to track AWS/Azure spend, include SAP BTP in that framework. Pull data from the BTP cockpit into a consolidated report. FinOps is about continuous optimization – apply those principles here too. Look for trends like cost per user or cost per transaction improving over time as you optimize.
- Training and Awareness: Include cost governance in onboarding for any team using BTP. Make sure everyone knows the basics of how BTP is billed, where to find cost info, and whom to contact for cost-related questions. An aware team is far less likely to incur dumb overspend.
In addition to these measures, define some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track the effectiveness of your cost governance:
- Credit Consumption Variance (Plan vs Actual): How does your actual monthly credit burn compare to your plan or budget? Track the variance percentage. The smaller the variance, the better you are at forecasting and controlling usage.
- Percentage of Idle Services: Out of all active services, what percent had no or minimal activity in the last month? This KPI highlights waste. Aim to reduce this over time through cleanups and auto-shutdowns.
- Cost per Runtime Hour or per API Call: This measures efficiency. For example, if you have 1000 runtime hours consumed, what was the cost per hour on average? Or cost per 1000 API calls. If this metric goes down over time, you’re getting more value for each unit of usage (through optimization, better sizing, etc.).
- Credit Rollover Utilization Rate: If you negotiated credit rollover or have multiple-year pools, track how many credits are at risk of expiring unused. For instance, if you had 10,000 credits rollover and you managed to use 8,000 before they expired, that’s an 80% utilization of potentially lost credits. You want that as close to 100% as possible – it means you rescued value that might have been lost.
By implementing a governance framework with these policies and metrics, you create a culture of cost awareness. SAP BTP can deliver tremendous value, but only if managed deliberately. Governance turns random cost outcomes into predictable, controllable ones.
5 Steps to Eliminate BTP Cost Waste
Finally, let’s summarize the most critical actions you can take right now to cut out waste in your SAP BTP spending.
These are the quick wins or high-impact steps to enforce what we’ve discussed:
- Automate Non-Prod Shutdowns: Set up automatic shutdown for all non-production BTP runtimes (development, test, sandbox) during off-hours. This single step can slash your runtime costs by 30-50% by eliminating unnecessary overnight and weekend usage.
- Audit and Clean Up Monthly: Every month, review your BTP accounts for idle services or duplicate subaccounts. Terminate unused services and consolidate environments. Consistent clean-up ensures you’re not paying for anything that isn’t actively providing value.
- Right-Size Everything (Especially HANA): Review resource allocations for databases and applications. Downsize over-provisioned HANA Cloud instances to match actual usage, and choose smaller service plans for dev/test. Continuously adjust sizes so you only pay for what you truly need, with the option to scale up later if required.
- Secure Your Contract Value: Don’t let purchased credits go to waste. Negotiate protections like credit rollover or flexible reallocation in your SAP contracts. Also monitor your credit consumption against your contract – if you’re falling behind, ramp up usage or talk to SAP about adjustments before credits expire.
- Centralize Monitoring and Alerts: Implement a single, shared dashboard for BTP usage and set up alerts for threshold breaches (e.g., 75% credit usage). Make sure both IT and Finance see these alerts. By sharing live cost data across teams, you create joint accountability and can take action the moment something looks off.
By following these five steps, you’ll eliminate the most common sources of waste in SAP BTP. The result is a leaner, more controlled cloud investment – where every euro of BTP spend is aligned to actual business needs and no money is left on the table due to oversight.
With vigilant governance and the right practices, you can harness SAP BTP’s power without the hidden cost surprises. Enjoy the innovation, but keep a tight grip on those credits!
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