Cost is an essential non-functional property of cloud applications and is often a primary reason for companies to move to the cloud. One significant advantage of cloud platforms is the possibility to scale compute, storage, and networking resources up and down based on demand. However, as an application scales, so does the cost. Cost transparency of cloud applications is a common problem, and cloud providers have responded by providing means for detecting cost anomalies. However, detecting anomalies after billing is a workaround rather than a solution addressing the core problem. After introducing central cloud computing concepts and typical pricing approaches in the cloud, this talk outlines our vision of a vendor-agnostic cost model enabling reasoning about cost-optimal infrastructure and platform configurations based on expected workloads. The overall goal is to shift cost transparency left, i.e., to the developers and platform engineers who frequently provision cloud environments using web portals or Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) files. The talk concludes by summarizing the current trend towards Infrastructure-from-Code (IfC), where programming languages and cloud infrastructure descriptions converge into one paradigm, intending to automate infrastructure provisioning as much as possible. This area has huge potential for genetic improvement to optimize the IfC code and the provisioning mechanisms while balancing non-functional properties such as performance and cost.