The Problem
Stedi operates on an innovative serverless architecture with thousands of accounts and a deep focus on usage-based cost structures. The company’s goal is for each of their (currently) eight products to have its own P&L and for each product owner to have holistic ownership of their cloud cost footprint. Each product has a different usage based billing model which means that each product needs it’s own unit metric to understand its respective COGS. This cloud cost discipline extends to accounting practices, where Stedi needs to properly categorize cloud costs inline with accounting dimensions they use. Stedi needed a tool that could provide them with a complete overview of their costs, allow, them to focus on unit economics, and connect cloud cost data to financial dimensions.
The Solution
Native AWS tools fell short, unable to provide the necessary breadth of visibility across accounts, depth of visibility in terms of per-product cost analysis, out-of-the box reporting, and unit economics to track each products cost efficiency.
Cloudthread provides the overall visibility that Stedi needs to solve their cloud cost management problems and scale with confidence in cost efficiency. Cloudthread’s Cost View Library provides a single pane of glass for costs across products, Custom Cost Views map to segmentations within products, Reports keep cost owners informed of anomalies in case there’s an unexpected spike that needs to be analyzed. Cloudthread’s data ingestion api is used to for Stedi’s product-specific usage data in order to create Unit Metrics which are used to understand Stedi product margin and pricing. Cloudthread’s Rules Engine is used to map cloud costs to granular accounting dimensions.
The Results
Cloudthread is the foundation of Stedi’s cloud cost management and empowers a cost-conscious culture.
Teams within the platform allow owners to focus on costs in a way that can be easily consumed and Stedi's teams use Cloudthread for their weekly reviews.
Unit economics across different products (e.g. $ / M API requests) allow product teams to track cost efficiency trends, understand product margins, and price products effectively. In the future, Stedi plans to use unit metrics to forecast cloud cost increases inline with business growth forecasts.
