How CloudZero Allocates Spend Differently (And Better) Than Anyone Else

The need to optimize cloud costs is a fact of life for SaaS companies — it’s required to stay competitive. But to optimize effectively, you’ll first need to find a way to accurately allocate all costs to the resources, teams, products, features, and customers that generated them.

However, not all cloud cost allocation methods are created equal.

As a cloud cost intelligence platform, we’re well aware of the challenges around allocation, and that the methods used can make or break the user experience — and even dramatically affect your cost optimization results.

To clarify the differences and help you choose the cloud cost optimization platform that works best for you, we’ve put together the chart below.

It illustrates how CloudZero’s cost allocation compares with other cloud cost platforms in categories such as tagging, shared resources, multi-cloud data ingestion, and Kubernetes.

As you’ll see, our top priority at CloudZero is to give you fast, accurate, and granular cost data across multiple cloud environments with a minimal amount of effort required on your part.

How Do The Major Industry Players Handle Cloud Cost Allocation?

What Makes CloudZero’s Approach Unique?

At CloudZero, we want you to dive in and find valuable insights that can power your business decisions right away. We don’t want you to waste time with manual tagging, making guesses about shared resources, or switching back and forth between different dashboards to view your multi-cloud or third party service cost data.

Here’s what you can expect from working with us.

1. Complete, real-time cost allocation

Since most companies struggle to accurately or completely tag resources — and some resources are simply untaggable — tag-reliant allocation methods come with inherent problems. If some resources are improperly tagged or left untagged, these omissions will cause any further analysis to be inaccurate.

CloudZero, however, allows for complete and real-time cost allocation regardless of your tagging strategy. You can achieve 100% allocation in just hours and place spend into custom Dimensions even with few, low-quality, or no tags.

This is a completely unique feature that no one else currently offers. All competitors rely on tags heavily or exclusively to allocate cost data.

2. Telemetry-driven shared cost allocation

Most platforms require users to manually allocate shared costs. You could create a rule that allocate 30% of costs to one product and 70% to another. However, without the means to track resource usage automatically, your manual inputs would be little more than a guess.

That’s why CloudZero uses high-powered data models and custom telemetry metrics to crunch the numbers and find your actual, accurate spend for shared resources.

3. Full integration of costs from providers and third parties

We call this our “single pane of glass” approach. In other words, we can ingest and normalize any and all billing data to show you a single, intuitive display of all cloud spend in one place. Most competing platforms can’t ingest all cloud spend from different sources, and even if they can, they struggle to display it in a way that provides actionable insights. You might wind up with incomplete or inaccurate data or base your conclusions on just part of the picture because the data wasn’t unified in one convenient place.

4. Full Kubernetes visibility

No other platform offers the depth and granularity that CloudZero does in regard to Kubernetes spend. Most provide daily breakdowns of cost data separate from the rest of your cloud costs, while we can offer hourly reports within the context of your broader cloud environment.

Start With A Demo To Make Sure You’re Choosing The Right Platform For Your Needs

As you can see, cost allocation strategies vary widely from platform to platform. If your tagging strategy leaves something to be desired, if you work with multiple cloud providers or third-party services, or if you have many shared resources that make other methods of cost allocation difficult, CloudZero could be the right answer.

to see how CloudZero can quickly and easily allocate your costs.

Author: Cody Slingerland

Cody Slingerland, a FinOps certified practitioner, is an avid content creator with over 10 years of experience creating content for SaaS and technology companies. Cody collaborates with internal team members and subject matter experts to create expert-written content on the CloudZero blog.