Apptio announced on May 31, 2019, that it had acquired Cloudability, hoping to strengthen its mission through its new product.
Cloudability is a multi-cloud financial management platform for enterprises looking for a more unified way to view, understand, and act on cloud cost insight. Cloudability lets enterprises analyze cloud costs across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Apptio Cloudability provides FinOps capabilities as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). So customers do not need to download, install, or maintain it. Also, Cloudability features are available on a flexible pay-as-you-go basis.
In this guide, we’ll cover Cloudability’s pricing in further detail, how much Cloudability costs, and other possible solutions that may fit your needs.
Table Of Contents
Cloudability Features: What Does Cloudability Do?
Cloudability offers several cloud cost management tools integrated into one platform, allowing enterprise customers to gain insight into their cloud spending across clouds.
Credit: Cloudability rightsizing feature via AWS
The tool helps organizations adopt cloud financial management, a technique for enhancing financial accountability in the scalable, dynamic, and decentralized cloud environment.
Cloudability’s most popular features include:
- Cloud financial management automation – Enables DevOps, finance, and management teams to actively collect, analyze, and visualize cloud costs relevant to their organization.
- Cloudability TotalCost – Captures and allocates costs across an entire cloud program, including support charges, enabling cloud spend chargeback in full. Allocation and chargeback allow users to monitor cloud usage and spending by specific business users, teams, or departments.
- Dashboards and reports – Provides teams with an overview of their cost of goods sold (COGS) data so they can see how their cloud investments relate to business value.
- Budget and forecasting – Manages cloud budgets, monitors resource consumption, and analyzes costs over time, translating historical cost data into forecasting intelligence.
- Cloud resource rightsizing and recommendations – Helps determine which resources are over-or underutilized based on your specific use case to lower costs while improving performance. Also, receive custom resource rightsizing recommendations by service, team, or project.
- Reserved instance planning – Automatically analyzes cloud usage patterns and dynamic requirements to help buy and utilize suitable Reserved Instances, saving costs and maximizing ROI. It also offers recommendations on how to optimize AWS Savings Plans.
- Container/Kubernetes cost allocation – Enables teams to practice cloud cost accountability by correlating container/Kubernetes spend to business value.
- Professional services – Provides training to customers on how to use its cloud cost management platform.
- Cost anomaly detection – Detects and reports abnormal or unexpected costs to prevent unexpected cloud costs.
So, how much does Cloudability charge for these cloud cost management capabilities?
How Much Does Apptio Cloudability Cost?
Cloudability charges on an individual basis; custom pricing. The platform requires website visitors to request a custom quote.
Capterra claims pricing is for each feature per month, starting at $499 per feature per month.
According to the AWS Marketplace, as of June 2022, Apptio Cloudability offers tiered pricing, starting at $54,000 to manage $150,000 per month in monthly AWS cloud spend, then $97,200 for $300,000 in monthly AWS spend, and $162,000 for $600,000 in monthly AWS cloud spend.
Credit: Apptio – Cloudability Pricing via AWS
In larger organizations, Cloudability can cost up to $5.4 million to manage $15 million in cloud spending.
The platform’s free trial lasts 14 days, and there is no free plan.
Is Cloudability Pricing Worth It?
Cloudability fits the bill for measuring high-level metrics, such as cost center costs, as other traditional cloud cost management platforms do.
In addition, Cloudability is suitable for large enterprises with substantial cloud budgets to manage, multi-cloud operations, and dedicated cloud management staff.
Cloudability also uses tags for cloud cost allocation, which can be challenging to create and maintain for many organizations.
But it lacks detailed insights, such as cost per customer, cost per feature, or cost per deployment. Yet, these are the granular, actionable insights you need to guide cloud investment decisions, such as:
- Using data to tell how to price your SaaS products to improve profitability.
- Analyzing the costs of supporting individual customers, products, teams, projects, and environments to protect your margins.
- Viewing your cloud bill at different granular levels to compare costs, such as average cost per customer vs. cost per customer or tenant — and how costs have changed over time.
- Accurately mapping cost metrics to the people, processes, and products responsible for identifying improvement opportunities.
- Increasing savings and system performance by automatically applying rightsizing recommendations
Cloudability users also want the platform to have a less steep learning curve, be more accurate, and have a less overwhelming interface. They say that it is tricky to find the data to make informed, actionable, and timely decisions without expert guidance.
What’s The Alternative To Cloudability?
Here is a list of the top Cloudability alternatives. However, if you’re just looking for a straightforward recommendation to consider on your own, consider CloudZero.
CloudZero is a modern cloud cost intelligence platform that delivers continuous, granular cloud cost insight.
CloudZero enables to you:
- Not be charged a percentage of your spending on the cloud, as Cloudability charges are. Instead, CloudZero pricing is custom to your environment. This makes CloudZero cost-effective. See how customers like Drift, TripAdvisor, and MalwareBytes use CloudZero successfully here.
- Collect, analyze, and understand cloud costs by the customer, tenant, feature, environment, project, team, etc. You’ll know precisely who, what, and why your costs are changing, so you can determine what tradeoffs to make to optimize costs without compromising engineering velocity or customer satisfaction.
- Accurately allocate costs for tagged, untagged, and untaggable resources in your environment to eliminate cost blindspots — even if you have messy tags.
- Allocate costs of shared resources in multi-tenant environments to see how different tenants consume resources and how to price your services accordingly.
- Present AWS costs alongside Snowflake costs for a complete cloud cost analysis.
- Gain Kubernetes cost intelligence to help you make sense and optimize costs of both containerized and non-containerized spend – down to the hour and pod.
- Align DevOps and finance teams to collaborate on cloud financial management and optimization.
- Nurture a cost-aware engineering culture to help engineers improve costs at the architectural level.
- Detect cost anomalies and automatically receive alerts via email and Slack to prevent overspending
CloudZero also offers budget and forecasting, an optimization dashboard for AWS Savings Plans/Reserve Instance management/Spot Instance orchestration, a cloud migration acceleration dashboard, and more.
Schedule a demo today to see CloudZero in action for yourself!
Cloudability Pricing FAQs
Who is Cloudability best for?
Apptio Cloudability is best suited to medium to large enterprises with substantial cloud spend across two or more clouds.
Does Cloudability support azure?
Apptio Cloudability supports the major cloud service providers, including AWS, Azure, and GCP.
What support options does Cloudability provide?
Expect professional support services, including onboarding, training, setup, and ongoing support. Documentation and webinar-based support are also available.
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