Overview
About
Wise is a financial technology company focused on global money transfers. Headquartered in London, it offers three main products: Wise Account, Wise Business, and Wise Platform.
Challenge
Wise’s speedy growth made it challenging to manage their cloud costs. Their previous tool, Cloudability, was not making it easier for engineers to consume cost data.
Solution
Implemented CloudZero to boost spend allocation, identify cost anomalies, and give engineers relevant, timely data about the cost of their cloud infrastructure.
Outcomes
- Engaged 250+ engineers in proactive cost management
- Identified a $72,000 anomaly in hours
- Automated financial reporting for senior management business reviews
The Challenge
In 2023, fintech company Wise faced an all-too-common problem. The platform, which helps people send money all over the world in a matter of clicks, had seen substantial user growth in the last several years. Wise’s annual revenue was growing fast — approaching the remarkable $1B milestone — but so were their cloud costs.
“We had started to get pushback from finance,” said Ed Boorn, a technical product manager in charge of platform integrations and cloud economics at Wise. “Lots of ‘Why’ questions that we were having trouble answering — ‘Why is x service costing more?’ ‘Why is this month’s AWS invoice so high?’ — questions we were spending a lot of time to answer not very well.”
The questions were hard to answer, Ed said, for the primary reason that their incumbent tool “wasn’t making it easier for engineers to consume cost.” It wasn’t clear which engineers/teams owned which costs, and by extension, it wasn’t clear who should be answering those “Why” questions — much less how they should answer them.
As they grew into rarefied SaaS territory, Wise had a series of cloud cost objectives:
- Get organized — and granular. First and foremost, Wise needed to allocate their cloud costs in a way that made sense to their business. In view of the nagging “Why” questions, Wise wanted to allocate by their squad and tribe engineering hierarchy, to clarify who was responsible for what cloud spending. Wise also lacked visibility into their shared Kubernetes costs, which are notoriously difficult to allocate.
- Engineering engagement. Beyond knowing who was responsible for what, Wise wanted to get engineers engaged in the practice of cloud cost management (CCM). They wanted it to be easy for engineers to incorporate CCM into their daily workflows, by taking the data to the places where they’re most likely to derive action from it.
- Unit cost metrics. A public fintech company, Wise is very metrics-aware; from the get-go, Wise wanted to calculate unit cost metrics that would quantify the overall business value they derived from their cloud investment. Specifically, Wise wanted to calculate core unit cost metrics that would let them relentlessly optimize their unit economics, and in so doing, drop prices for customers.
The Solution
Wise’s team evaluated CloudZero, the global leader in proactive cloud efficiency and cloud unit economics. CloudZero ingested 100% of Wise’s cloud spend — primarily AWS, but also Snowflake, GCP, and Credal — and used CostFormation® to clean up what had become a messy tagging environment.
“Being able to clean up years of missed tagging was super appealing,” Ed said of the cost allocation process. “It was kind of addicting — I got in a rhythm of reviewing our unallocated spend, figuring out who was responsible for it, and adding it to the appropriate squad/tribe Dimensions.”
Shortly after starting the proof of value (POV) process, Wise achieved 95% allocation for their AWS spending — by far the biggest slice of their overall cloud costs. Wise also set up automatic Slack alerts to send engineers regular reports on their cloud spending, as well as notifications during anomalous spend events. With the infrastructure in place, Wise set about driving broader engagement.
The Results
Engaged 250+ engineers in proactive cost management
“We have over 250 that are engaged and logging in,” Ed said. “And that’s just logging in. We can bolt on quite a few more who are consuming the information via Snowflake or using it as an input to quarterly planning.”
Accounting for the widespread adoption, Ed credited both the quality of CloudZero’s data and a multi-pronged approach to engineering engagement. Targeted alerts, tailored dashboards and team views, regular reports, and smooth integration made CloudZero data both credible and easily accessible to a wide range of Wise’s FinOps personas.
“Now, we can see exactly which squads and tribes are trending up and which costs are driving that,” Ed said. “CloudZero enables us to add granular context to overarching spend changes.”
Remediated a $72,000 cost anomaly in hours
CloudZero Anomalies, a feature which identifies unusual spend and sends alerts to the relevant teams/engineers, has been very useful to Wise. “We had a database resource that someone scaled up for a drill and forgot to scale down — a classic mistake,” Ed said. “It went from costing $80 a month to $8,000. CloudZero caught it immediately, and we turned it off.”
That anomaly, Ed said, is one instance of many. “Baseline visibility like that makes the situation easy to understand. You don’t have to be a cloud expert to understand what’s happening.”
Automated financial reporting for senior management business reviews
In addition to providing granular visibility for individual engineers and engineering teams, Wise’s senior management now uses CloudZero’s high-level financial reports in monthly business reviews (MBRs) to analyze the cost profile alongside the product performance
Wise also has an MBR dashboard that shows month-over-month changes in spend, sorted by tribe. Then, for each tribe, they can drill into which squads and teams are pushing which costs. This way, Wise’s senior management can contextualize the overall health of their cloud spend in view of underlying team efficiency. If there are changes — positive or negative — they have credible pathways to investigate and remediate.
“Figuring out the processes finance uses and inserting the information CloudZero produces has been really effective,” Ed said. “We’re now including CloudZero dashboards as context for planning for all the squads in the business.”
