Azure (and other clouds) regularly leave behind undeletable orphaned resources — key vaults, storage accounts, NICs — that accumulate cost and clutter, and the native tools fail to remove them.
A CLI/SaaS tool that scans your cloud account for zombie resources, identifies why they're stuck (soft-delete policies, dependency locks, orphaned references), and provides one-click forced cleanup with audit trails.
Subscription — $29/mo for small teams, $199/mo for enterprise with scheduled scans and compliance reports
The pain is real, frequent, and infuriating. 1670 upvotes and 262 comments on a Reddit thread about Azure resource management failures is a strong signal. Cloud ops teams deal with this weekly. The pain compounds — zombie resources accumulate cost, clutter dashboards, fail compliance audits, and block Terraform destroys. The fact that NATIVE TOOLS FAIL at this is the killer signal — users have no good option today.
TAM is substantial but needs scoping. There are ~500K+ companies using Azure, AWS, or GCP commercially. Target is mid-market and enterprise cloud ops teams (estimated 50K-100K teams globally). At $29-199/mo, realistic SAM is $50M-200M. Not a billion-dollar TAM on its own, but large enough to build a very profitable business. Could expand into broader cloud hygiene/governance.
$29/mo is trivially justified if it saves even one hour of engineer time per month (engineer hour = $75-150). $199/mo for enterprise is well below the cost of a single zombie Key Vault sitting around for months. FinOps teams already have budget for tooling. The risk: some teams will try to solve this with scripts or Cloud Custodian policies, keeping them in the 'free/DIY' zone. Pricing feels right — low enough for impulse, high enough for revenue.
A solo dev can build an MVP CLI for one cloud (Azure) in 4-8 weeks, covering the most common zombie types (Key Vaults with soft-delete, orphaned NICs, stuck storage accounts). BUT: the hard part is the 'force delete' logic — each resource type has different stuck-state reasons, and the resolution paths are gnarly (purge vs. recover vs. remove-lock vs. detach-dependency). Multi-cloud multiplies effort 3x. Edge cases are the product here, and they take time to catalog. API permissions and security review for a tool with delete access is non-trivial.
This is the strongest signal. Existing tools fall into two buckets: (1) detection-only tools that show you orphans but can't fix them, and (2) nuclear options like cloud-nuke that destroy everything. NOBODY is building the surgical 'diagnose why it's stuck and force-fix it' tool. Cloud Custodian could theoretically do this but requires deep expertise to configure. The gap is clear: automated root-cause diagnosis + safe forced remediation + audit trail. This is a genuine whitespace.
Cloud resources become zombies continuously — this is not a one-time cleanup. New orphans appear after every deployment, every failed Terraform destroy, every team offboarding. Scheduled scans are a natural subscription feature. Compliance reporting (prove your environment is clean) adds ongoing value. Once teams depend on it, switching cost is moderate — they'd need to rebuild all their cleanup automation.
- +Clear whitespace — no tool solves 'force delete stuck cloud resources' specifically
- +Pain is validated by high-engagement community signals (1670 upvotes) and universal cloud ops frustration
- +Natural recurring revenue — zombies are created continuously, not once
- +Low entry price ($29/mo) makes adoption frictionless for small teams
- +Azure-first focus is strategic — Azure has the worst orphan problem and is underserved by DevOps tooling compared to AWS
- +CLI-first approach matches how cloud ops teams actually work
- !Cloud providers could fix their own cleanup tools (Azure has been slowly improving Resource Graph and purge APIs) — though they've been bad at this for years, so low near-term risk
- !Granting a third-party tool delete permissions on production cloud accounts is a hard trust barrier — security teams will push back
- !Edge case explosion: every resource type has unique stuck-state reasons, making the product a long tail of one-off fixes that are expensive to maintain
- !DIY risk: skilled cloud engineers may write their own scripts rather than pay, limiting the addressable market to less-technical or time-constrained teams
- !Multi-cloud is table stakes for enterprise deals but triples engineering effort
Open-source rules engine for cloud resource management. Lets you define policies to identify and act on unused/orphaned resources across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Community-driven with hundreds of pre-built policies.
Open-source CLI tool that deletes all resources in a cloud account. Designed for nuking dev/test environments. Supports AWS primarily, limited Azure/GCP.
Native cloud provider tools that recommend cost optimizations, flag idle resources, and suggest right-sizing. Built into the cloud console at no additional cost.
Cloud infrastructure optimization platform covering compute, storage, and Kubernetes cost optimization. Focuses on automated scaling and reserved instance management.
Open-source cloud environment inspector. Provides visibility into cloud resources, cost tracking, and identifies idle/unused resources across AWS, Azure, GCP, and others.
Azure-only CLI tool. Scan a subscription, identify the top 5 most common zombie resource types (Key Vaults with soft-delete enabled, orphaned NICs, orphaned public IPs, stuck storage accounts, empty resource groups with delete locks). For each: diagnose the root cause, show a remediation plan, and offer one-command forced cleanup with a before/after audit log. Ship as a pip/brew installable CLI. No SaaS, no UI — just solve the pain fast and share it on r/azure and r/devops.
Free CLI with 5 resource scan limit (lead gen) -> $29/mo Pro CLI with unlimited scans + scheduled runs + Slack alerts -> $199/mo Team with multi-subscription support, compliance reports, approval workflows, and SSO -> $499+/mo Enterprise with multi-cloud, API access, Terraform integration, and dedicated support
6-10 weeks. 4-6 weeks to build Azure MVP CLI, 2-4 weeks of community seeding on Reddit/HackerNews/DevOps communities. First paying customers likely from the open-source funnel within 2-3 months of launch. Azure pain is acute enough that early adopters will convert fast if the tool actually solves stuck resources they've been fighting manually.
- “zombie resources that can not be deleted”
- “Regularly happens with key vault and storage accounts”
- “it is actually insane how many issues you encounter in azure”