Cloud costs are notoriously hard to predict—trickier than deciphering the emotions of a housecat.
Traditional cost management tools leave many companies with a lack of visibility into where their money is going, which holds back engineering teams from making informed savings decisions. These tools also fail to bridge the gap with finance teams, who speak a different language than their developer counterparts.
The result: Teams squander countless hours dissecting costs rather than focusing on innovation.
Many of our customers found themselves in less-than-ideal scenarios before switching to CloudZero. But what has life been like since they made the move? Keep reading to find out!
CloudZero Customers’ Favorite Platform Perks
1. Empowered engineers
“My team, the one that’s responsible for maintaining our core platform, is much more involved. They’re looking at numbers and making intelligent decisions about how to manage our costs.”
Robert Mason, CTO at Applause
Engineering decisions are integral to innovation. Our customers love that CloudZero goes beyond mere cost reduction to put greater autonomy in engineers’ hands so they can drive real change.
By providing engineering teams with visibility into the cost implications of their decisions, CloudZero fosters a culture of cost-consciousness without sacrificing development speed.
CloudZero lets engineers see how their coding decisions affect cloud costs in real time, allowing them to make informed choices that align with organizational objectives. This level of transparency not only enables engineers to understand the broader context of their work, but also helps them take ownership of cost efficiency.
Empowered engineers are better equipped to prioritize tasks, optimize code, and identify opportunities for cost savings. At Applause, this change in behavior helped drive a 23% reduction in cloud costs annually.
Our customers also appreciate that CloudZero provides tools and resources to help engineering teams optimize workflows and streamline development processes. For example, identifying inefficiencies in code, optimizing resource usage, and implementing best practices for cost-effective development are all easier tasks with CloudZero.
2. Clear visibility into cloud costs
“It’s kind of fun spelunking in your cloud spend. There were all these views we hadn’t seen before, and it was easy to get some quick wins. We started using CloudZero data to anticipate how much we were going to spend on cloud resources in the future.”
Michael Waltz, Principal DevOps Engineer at Demandbase
Traditional cloud platforms offer basic cost monitoring, but CloudZero takes it a step further, providing unparalleled insight into all aspects of cloud spending. Customers love the wealth of granular details they have access to with our platform. This level of visibility enables them to dissect costs per customer, per feature, and even per transaction.
At Demandbase, this ultimately led to a 36% reduction in annual cloud spend, and fostered an engineering culture of cost autonomy.
CloudZero’s insight into cloud costs also extends beyond traditional cloud services to include technology like MongoDB, Snowflake, and New Relic. This holistic view of cloud spending ensures our customers have a complete picture of their expenses, setting them up for more accurate budgeting and forecasting.
By understanding exactly where their cloud dollars are going, businesses can more easily identify areas of overspending or reallocate resources to high-impact projects.
3. Robust analytics and dashboards
“[With CloudZero], we monitor customer-specific API calls in proportion to our overall AWS spend to figure out who’s using our products, how much, and at what cost. When we have information around our customer base, it lets us understand pricing, improve our margins, manage EBITDA, and optimize our business as a whole.”
Laurent Py, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Smartbear
Finance teams and engineers may speak different languages, but CloudZero’s comprehensive analytics and customizable dashboards ensure that stakeholders company-wide have access to the information they need—all the way up to the CEO.
At Smartbear, the company leveraged CloudZero to gain essential visibility into key financial metrics, such as an increasingly granular understanding of cost incurred by customers. This enabled them to shift strategies according to customer types, thereby raising revenues without expending additional engineering resources.
This is why our customers love the ability to dive deep into their cloud spending data and uncover trends, patterns, and anomalies that could impact their bottom line.
Our dashboards empower users to tailor their analytics experience to their needs and preferences. For instance, they can create personalized dashboards and weekly reports for different departments or customize views to highlight specific metrics. They can even set up automated alerts about cost spikes.
4. Unit economics mastery
For Nubank, the holy grail lies in maintaining a cost of $1 or below to serve each customer, which means every app transaction costs less than a dollar to facilitate. By leveraging our platform, Nubank has achieved unit economics mastery.
“CloudZero has one of the most powerful cloud cost intelligence platforms on the market. Lowering the cost to serve creates leverage because more gross margin means more business opportunities. When you give smart and capable people more gross margin, they can use it to deliver more great products.” —
Mike Rosenberg, Senior Director of Engineering at Nubank
Unit economics is where CloudZero really shines. Take our partnership with Nubank as an example—an online bank based in Brazil, and our largest customer. With a staggering 90 million clients, Nubank’s app is a vital resource for individuals without bank accounts in developing markets like Brazil, Columbia, and Mexico.
When Nubank started out, the company was innovating rapidly, buoyed by the perception that cloud services were essentially free. However, as the bank prepared for its IPO, the focus shifted to scrutinizing unit economics, including the cost to acquire and serve customers.
Nubank wanted to expand the company’s customer base, increase revenue per customer, and minimize the cost to serve each customer. CloudZero was indispensable for achieving these goals and has dramatically increased the efficiency of the company’s cloud cost management.
5. Gamification To Hit Savings Targets
“CloudZero has transformed our approach to cloud financial management. It has given engineering and finance a platform on which to build common ground. It has laid the foundation for FinOps by spurring cross-team collaboration that didn’t exist before.”
Daniel Snowden, Cloud Engineering Lead at INRIX
For many customers, CloudZero isn’t just a tool for managing costs. We’re a strategic partner in achieving specific savings targets—and we make it fun. Take ‘Where’s My Cash? Fridays’ as an example. This gamification initiative incentivizes engineers to find and implement cost-saving opportunities. The winner gets a free pizza.
Brownie points for pizza aside, our customers love that they can use CloudZero to establish specific savings targets based on their business objectives.
These targets might include reducing overall cloud spending, optimizing costs for a specific project, or achieving a certain level of cost efficiency. CloudZero provides a roadmap to get to the goal and drives company-wide accountability.
In addition, by turning cost optimization into a collaborative and rewarding process, CloudZero helps teams foster a sense of ownership, boosting engagement and motivation.
But it’s not all fun and games. These gamification initiatives also provide valuable opportunities for learning and skill development, helping engineers develop expertise that enhances their value within the organization.
6. Expert-level customer care
“[CloudZero provides] the highest level of concierge you can have. It’s like an extension of my team. It’s a must-have — I would give it an eleven out of ten, no kidding.”
Alberto Silveira, Head of Engineering at LawnStarter
People are the heart of any business, and our customers appreciate our approach to service just as much as they appreciate our software.
CloudZero goes beyond offering a product to deliver a real partnership aimed at achieving joint success. Our aptly-named Joint Success Plans ensure that customers receive personalized support from onboarding to ongoing optimization.
Some of the best feedback we get is about our Customer Success team. All of our FinOps Account Managers (FAMs) come from a FinOps consulting background, so they have a firsthand understanding of the challenges our customers face.
This blend of product expertise and industry experience sets us apart from the traditional cost management platforms our customers switched over from.
At LawnStarter, Alberto’s partnership with his CloudZero FAM, Thalia Elie, has helped him institute FinOps best practices and identify multiple multi-thousand-dollar efficiencies in the company’s cloud environment.
See what you have to gain by switching to CloudZero — 
to take a closer look at our platform!
Are you looking to gain a deeper understanding of your cloud costs? Get ready to achieve that and much more.
CloudZero doesn’t just help you see and manage costs — it transforms the way you operate in the cloud. By empowering teams, fostering collaboration, and driving efficiency, your company can redefine what’s possible when it comes to cloud cost optimization.
Your ability to correlate cloud spending with key business metrics translates into better business decisions driven by data and unlocks new opportunities for growth. Find out how to make the switch to cloud cost intelligence today.
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