Worldwide spending on public cloud services is forecast to reach $723.4 billion in 2025, up from $595.7 billion in 2024. A significant portion of this spending is attributed to waste or inefficient cloud usage. In the 2025 State of FinOps Report, the FinOps Foundation shares that more than half of the respondents indicated “workload optimization and waste reduction” as a priority for avoiding overspending. Reasons for such waste and overspending include overlooked resources, incorrect resource allocation, inadequate cost visibility, or the absence of a culture that fosters cost consciousness. This research aims to describe nine strategies to optimize cloud costs, documented as patterns. These patterns can be adopted individually or leveraged in tandem for increased efficiency. The patterns are presented as a language, offering a pragmatic foundation for cloud practitioners to optimize their cloud costs, while also serving as a standardized vocabulary for discussing cloud optimization initiatives. This paper is the first in a series of publications related to this research. It presents the overall pattern language, describes the problem-solution pair for each pattern, and provides a detailed discussion of the first pattern, Budget Alerts. Future work will focus on elaborating each pattern individually to formalize the complete pattern language.