The Shadow Cloud Spend: $50k a Month Hiding in Forgotten Dev Accounts Every mid-size engineering organization has 5 to 15 AWS accounts that nobody actively owns. The "POC" account from 2024. The "team-old-name" account that survived the 2025 reorg. The "consultant-X-temp" account that got a working IAM role and then went quiet. Each one runs a few NAT gateways, an idle RDS, EBS volumes from 2023, and a CloudWatch log group with infinite retention. Shadow cloud spend in those forgotten accounts totals $30,000 to $80,000 per month per organization. None of it produces business value. None of it shows up cleanly on the FinOps dashboard, because cost-allocation tag schemes assume the account has an active owner and the forgotten accounts have stale or no tags. The accounts are hard to see for the same reason they are hard to reclaim. The original owner left. The team got renamed. The IAM root credentials are in a stale 1Password vault. AWS Organizations sees the account but no human has logged in for 9 months.…