Do you do cloud financial management?
There are tons of tech stacks out there ... AWS services here, Azure services there, stripe for payments, and additionally some other third-party SaaS provider.
Orchestrating all of those services seems to be a huge task on a technical level, but what about financial management? 🤯
- Do you forecast cloud spending for the next month?
- How do you avoid vendor lock-ins?
- What are the cloud KPIs you focus on most?
- How do you manage (end-user) licenses to SaaS providers you use?
- Do you keep track of EULA changes?
It would be great if you can share some of your practices to make cloud financial management (costs) more transparent.
Thanks in advance for every reply.
(BTW ... I am working on a master thesis that covers that topic.)
The total cost of ownership calculation on index funds often gets glossed over — expense ratios are just part of the picture. Trading costs from rebalancing, bid-ask spreads on less liquid names, and tax inefficiency from turnover can eat into the theoretical alpha. It's the same trap people fall into with car financing: the headline number looks good until you run the full math.
At my last startup, our two greatest expenses were personel, far and away the highest expense, followed by marketing. In the first year our cloud expenses were fourth behind software licenses.
I wish I could say that our success was high enough that some of things you mention became a problem. Instead we were too focused on adding features and getting clients.
Thanks @Meistro for sharing your insight!
That is very interesting, since it shows a common phenomena I noticed already. The focus is somewhere else (adding features and getting clients is super important!) and when "those issues" arise it is too late probably. And you are only doing damage limitation.
Hey @austinparker do you think this question is interesting enough be featured a little bit?