Every service provisioned from a Backstage template starts with a git repo, a Kubernetes namespace, and a CI pipeline. It starts with zero budget alerts, zero mandatory tags, and a dev environment that runs 24 hours a day. The platform team did not choose this. They just never added cost defaults to the template. The bill for that choice arrives slowly, then all at once. At 10 services, the missing tags are annoying. At 50 services, the unlabeled spend is unattributable. At 100 services, the finance team is asking questions the platform team cannot answer. Golden Paths Without Cost Defaults Ship Waste by Design A golden path template is a forcing function. Every developer who provisions a new service from it inherits exactly what the template defines, nothing more. If the template does not include a budget alert, no service gets one. If the template does not enforce tags, no service ships with them. The template author makes this decision once, and every downstream service lives with it.…