Infracost: The “DevFinance” Cloud Cost-Management Solution We Were Looking For
Everyone loves charts that go up and to the right — unless the charts are describing costs. But as the trajectory of cloud adoption has gone dramatically up and to the right over the past 15 years since the birth of AWS, cloud bills have followed suit. What’s more, these costs are often wildly unpredictable, with nearly two-thirds of companies in a recent survey reporting their usage was higher than planned.
And while the problem of growing and unexpected cloud costs is not new, it may be reaching a tipping point. Some in the industry have even suggested a retreat to company-owned data centers as a radical attempt to curb cloud costs. The wheel of computing history is unlikely to turn back to on-prem solutions. But the need to proactively manage cloud costs is increasingly acute.
At Sequoia, we gather infrastructure leaders from companies such as Stripe, LinkedIn, DoorDash, Pinterest, Slack, Palantir, Confluent and Atlassian for a roundtable discussion once every quarter, and earlier this year we asked participants about their strategies for containing cloud costs. The prevailing perspective was that the most common approach — in which a Finance team is tasked with “slicing and dicing” costs after the cloud bill has arrived — is a fool’s errand. Finance may plead with Engineering to make changes. But by that point, cloud infrastructure is provisioned, some apps are running on it in production, and developers have moved on to their next project. There’s little bandwidth to rework what’s already in place, and the only real solution is to begrudgingly pay the bill.
While the industry abounds with cloud cost-management solutions, this fundamental problem remains. Ideally, developers and SREs would instead be armed with visibility into costs when they are writing new software and provisioning new infrastructure, enabling them to make informed decisions before they ever merge a new pull request.
So we scoured the landscape for a better solution — and found Infracost.
YC-backed in winter 2021, brothers Hassan and Ali Khajeh-Hosseini and their co-founder Alistair Scott are building the developer-centric solution we hoped to find. When we introduced Infracost to some of our infrastructure roundtable participants, the value prop immediately resonated, and developers from companies including Okta, BMW, Accenture, GitLab and HPE are already using the product. Ultimately, the founders’ vision is to catalyze a complete cultural shift among their customers, encouraging engineering organizations to care about the cost of their code as much as they care about its security and performance.
For more than a decade, the “shift left” trend has pushed developers to take ownership of disciplines that were previously handled downstream, by other functions. Just as DevOps denotes engineers taking care of operations and DevSec is about engineers handling of security, Infracost has the potential to drive a “DevFinance” transformation where engineers take ownership of cloud cost.
This is a team with deep expertise in the field. The founders built one of the first cloud cost-management products nearly a decade ago, and Infracost is their fourth startup together. Even better, they are creating a passionate community around them. Like many developer-focused solutions, Infracost is open source, and any developer can get started in a matter of minutes.
From supporting new cloud resources and providers to incorporating custom pricing discounts and usage-based estimates, Hassan, Ali and Alistair have plenty of interesting problems on their roadmap — so if you’re interested in joining Infracost, please reach out! We at Sequoia are proud to join forces with them at the seed and excited to see both the team and product grow as cloud cost decision-making shifts left.
