Top 18 'Cloud-Cost-Crushing' FinOps Platforms to use for developers to prevent budget overruns on AWS & Azure - Goh Ling Yong
It's the classic developer horror story. You spin up a powerful m6g.16xlarge instance on AWS for a "quick" performance test. You get pulled into a production fire, the weekend comes and goes, and you completely forget about it. A week later, the finance team is knocking on your manager's door with a bill that looks more like a phone number. Ouch.
We've all been there, or at least heard the cautionary tales. The cloud's greatest strength—its on-demand, seemingly infinite scalability—is also its greatest financial risk. Without guardrails, costs can spiral out of control with terrifying speed. This is where FinOps comes in. It's not about finance policing engineering; it's a cultural practice that brings financial accountability to the cloud, empowering developers like you to make cost-aware decisions without stifling innovation.
The good news is you don't have to do this manually. A new generation of FinOps platforms has emerged, designed to give you the visibility, insights, and automation needed to crush cloud costs before they become a problem. As an engineering leader, I've seen firsthand how these costs can spiral. It's a topic Goh Ling Yong and I have discussed often: empowering developers with the right tools is the key to sustainable cloud innovation. Here are 18 of the best "cloud-cost-crushing" platforms to help you prevent budget overruns on AWS and Azure.
1. AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer is your native starting point for understanding your AWS bill. It's built right into the AWS console and provides a default level of visibility into your spending patterns. You can visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.
For developers, this is the first line of defense. You can filter and group data by service, linked account, tags, and more. This helps you answer fundamental questions like, "Which S3 bucket is suddenly costing a fortune?" or "How much did my team's new microservice cost last month?" It's not the most advanced tool, but its power lies in its accessibility and integration.
- Pro Tip: Get religious about tagging. Create a tagging policy for your team (e.g.,
project,owner,environment) and use AWS Cost Explorer to filter by these tags. This is the single most effective way to attribute costs directly to your features or experiments.
2. Azure Cost Management + Billing
Much like its AWS counterpart, Azure Cost Management + Billing is the native tool for anyone running workloads on Microsoft's cloud. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools to monitor, allocate, and optimize your cloud spend directly within the Azure portal.
Developers can use it to create budgets with automated alerts, getting a notification before a project goes off the rails financially. The platform also offers powerful cost analysis features, allowing you to slice and dice your spending data by resource group, tag, or location. Its recommendations engine can also spot idle resources or suggest rightsizing opportunities.
- Pro Tip: Use the "Budgets" feature to set up alerts for specific resource groups tied to your projects. For example, set a budget for your
dev-environmentresource group that notifies your team's Slack channel when you reach 80% of the monthly allocation.
3. CloudHealth by VMware
CloudHealth is an enterprise-grade, multi-cloud management platform. It's a heavyweight in the FinOps space, designed for large organizations that need centralized visibility and policy-driven governance across AWS, Azure, GCP, and even their on-premise data centers.
While it might seem like a tool for the central FinOps team, it offers immense value to developers in a large company. It provides detailed cost and usage reports, rightsizing recommendations for virtual machines and databases, and helps manage Reserved Instance (RI) and Savings Plan portfolios. By using its dashboards, you can see exactly how the resources you provisioned contribute to the company's bottom line.
- Example: Your team can create a custom "Perspective" in CloudHealth that groups all assets related to your application (e.g., specific EC2 instances, RDS databases, S3 buckets). This gives you a single, clear view of your application's total cost, independent of how they are organized across different AWS accounts.
4. Apptio Cloudability
Another enterprise titan, Apptio Cloudability, excels at providing granular cost allocation and analytics. It helps organizations accurately attribute every single dollar of cloud spend to the right team, product, or feature, turning the complex cloud bill into an understandable business report.
For developers, Cloudability's strength lies in its ability to show you the "why" behind the cost. Its analytics engine can help you understand cost drivers, such as data transfer fees or API call charges, that are often hidden in the raw billing data. It helps you build a business case for refactoring a chatty service by showing exactly how much it costs in egress fees.
- Pro Tip: Leverage Cloudability's Tag Explorer to identify untagged or improperly tagged resources you've launched. Cleaning this up not only helps the finance team but also ensures your project gets proper credit (or blame!) for its cloud consumption.
5. Spot by NetApp
Spot by NetApp is a game-changer for anyone looking to slash their compute costs. Its core mission is to make it safe and easy to use spot instances—the spare compute capacity in AWS and Azure that can be up to 90% cheaper than on-demand—for even production and mission-critical workloads.
This is a developer's dream. Instead of manually managing spot instances and worrying about interruptions, you define your application's needs, and Spot's platform, Elastigroup, handles the rest. It predicts interruptions and gracefully moves your workloads to other spot, on-demand, or RI capacity without downtime. It also automates RI and Savings Plan management to maximize your savings.
- Example: You can run a Kubernetes cluster on Spot's Ocean product. It will automatically provision a mix of spot, reserved, and on-demand instances to meet your pods' requirements at the lowest possible cost, even rightsizing the nodes in real-time as your workload changes.
6. Harness Cloud Cost Management
Harness is best known for its CI/CD platform, but its Cloud Cost Management (CCM) module is a powerful FinOps tool built with an engineering-first mindset. It correlates cloud cost changes directly with your software delivery pipeline, answering the crucial question: "Did my last deployment increase our cloud spend?"
This is "shift-left" FinOps in action. Harness provides cost visibility in the context of your applications, microservices, and Kubernetes workloads. It can show you the cost of a specific microservice, even if it's running on shared cluster resources. It also provides recommendations for idle or underutilized resources.
- Pro Tip: Integrate Harness CCM with your CI/CD pipeline to automatically detect cost spikes after a new release. You can set up governance rules that flag a deployment if it causes an anomalous cost increase, bringing immediate attention to potential issues.
7. Vantage
Vantage is a modern, developer-friendly FinOps platform with a beautifully designed UI. It connects to AWS, Azure, GCP, and even other providers like Datadog and Snowflake, giving you a single pane of glass for all your infrastructure costs.
Its focus is on simplicity and clarity. Developers can quickly create dashboards to track costs for specific projects or services. Vantage automatically groups related resources (like an EC2 instance, its EBS volumes, and its load balancer) into "Cost Reports," making it easy to see the total cost of a feature.
- Example: You can create a Vantage Cost Report filtered by the
app: my-new-featuretag. Share the link in your team's Slack channel so everyone can monitor the feature's cloud spend in real-time during its beta launch.
8. Infracost
Infracost is perhaps the ultimate "shift-left" cost management tool. It's an open-source command-line interface (CLI) that shows you cloud cost estimates for your Terraform and CloudFormation changes before you even commit the code. It integrates directly into your pull request workflow.
This tool fundamentally changes the developer workflow. As you write your Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Infracost adds a comment to your PR showing the cost breakdown of the changes. For example, "This change will increase your monthly bill by $450.50," with a line-by-line breakdown. It empowers you to make cost-effective architecture choices from the very beginning.
- Pro Tip: Integrate Infracost with GitHub Actions or GitLab CI. This provides free, automated cost estimates on every PR, creating a culture of cost awareness across the entire engineering team with minimal effort.
9. Kubecost
If you're running on Kubernetes, you need Kubecost. It has become the de-facto open-source standard for cost monitoring and management in Kubernetes environments. It provides real-time cost visibility and insights for teams using Kubernetes, helping you break down costs by any K8s concept: namespace, deployment, service, pod, and more.
Developers no longer have to guess how much their services are costing on a shared cluster. Kubecost gives you precise allocation, showing you which teams or applications are driving the spend. It also provides actionable recommendations, like identifying abandoned workloads or suggesting resource requests that better match actual utilization.
- Example: Use Kubecost to identify which namespace in your development cluster is the most expensive. You can then drill down to the specific deployments and pods to see if there's a memory leak or an over-provisioned service that can be rightsized.
10. Cast AI
Cast AI is a Kubernetes automation platform that goes beyond just visibility. It actively and automatically optimizes your cluster for cost, performance, and reliability. It analyzes your workload and intelligently selects the best instance types and sizes, leveraging spot instances heavily to drive down costs.
This is like putting your cluster cost management on autopilot. For developers, it means you can focus on your application logic instead of constantly tweaking your node pool configurations. Cast AI's rebalancing algorithm continuously optimizes the cluster, ensuring you're never overpaying for compute.
- Pro Tip: Use the Cast AI "Savings Estimator" to get a free, no-obligation report on your existing K8s cluster. It will analyze your setup and show you exactly how much you could save by implementing its automated optimizations.
11. Finout
Finout is a modern FinOps platform that aims to connect cloud costs to business metrics. It moves beyond just infrastructure costs and helps you understand your unit economics, like Cost per Customer or Cost per Transaction. It achieves this by being ableto merge cost data with business data from sources like Datadog or your own internal systems.
This is incredibly powerful for developers working on product-led teams. You can finally see the direct financial impact of your work. If you ship a feature that becomes widely adopted, you can see both the revenue it generates and the cloud cost it incurs, giving you a true picture of its profitability.
- Example: You could use Finout to track the
cost-per-daily-active-userfor your mobile app. If you deploy a new, resource-intensive recommendation engine, you can see how it affects that core business metric in real-time.
12. Densify
Densify uses machine learning to provide highly accurate, predictable, and automatable cloud resource optimization. Its core strength is in "rightsizing," analyzing workload patterns over time to recommend the perfect instance type and size. It takes the guesswork out of picking from the thousands of available VM SKUs.
While a central team might manage the platform, the recommendations are for developers. Densify can tell you that a service running on a c5.2xlarge could perform just as well on a cheaper m6g.xlarge instance, saving 40% with no performance degradation. It provides the data to back up these decisions, making it easy to get approval for changes.
- Pro Tip: Integrate Densify's recommendations into your change management process. Before provisioning new infrastructure, check if Densify has a recommendation for a similar existing workload to make a more cost-effective choice from the start.
13. Zesty
Zesty is an AI-powered cloud management platform that automates some of the most complex parts of cost optimization. It focuses on two key areas: commitment management and storage optimization. It automatically buys and sells RIs and Savings Plans to match your real-time usage, ensuring you get maximum discounts with minimum risk.
For developers, its most interesting feature might be Zesty Disk. It automatically adjusts the size and performance tier of your EBS volumes based on actual demand. This means you don't have to overprovision disk space "just in case," saving significant costs on block storage.
- Example: You provision a 500 GB gp3 volume for a new database, but it only uses 50 GB. Instead of letting you pay for the unused space, Zesty will automatically shrink the volume to a more appropriate size, dynamically expanding it later if usage grows.
14. Anodot
Anodot specializes in autonomous business monitoring, and that includes cloud costs. Its primary strength is in real-time anomaly detection. It uses machine learning to learn your normal spending patterns and instantly alerts you when something deviates from the norm.
This is your early warning system against bill shock. Did a developer accidentally leave a data-intensive script running in a loop? Anodot will catch the spike in data transfer costs within minutes, not weeks later when you get the bill. It helps you find and fix costly mistakes before they escalate.
- Pro Tip: Configure Anodot alerts to go directly to the relevant engineering team's Slack channel. This ensures the people who can actually fix the problem see the alert immediately, reducing the mean time to resolution for cost incidents.
15. Yotascale
Yotascale is a FinOps platform built with an engineering-first perspective. It focuses on providing context-rich, actionable insights that make sense to developers. It excels at mapping costs to engineering-centric concepts like teams, applications, and features, even in complex, shared environments.
One of its key differentiators is its focus on collaborative cost management. It allows engineers and finance to work from the same dataset but with views tailored to their needs. A developer can see the cost of their recent deployment, while a finance manager can see the overall budget variance for that product line.
- Example: Use Yotascale to create a unified view of your application's cost that includes both AWS/Azure infrastructure and third-party SaaS costs like Datadog or Snowflake, giving you a true total cost of ownership (TCO).
16. Flexera One
Flexera One is a comprehensive IT management solution that includes a powerful Cloud Cost Optimization module. It's designed for organizations managing complex hybrid environments, offering visibility across public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP) and private data centers.
For developer teams, Flexera provides a centralized place to view multi-cloud costs and receive optimization recommendations. It helps automate cost-saving actions like scheduling on/off times for development and staging environments, ensuring you're not paying for resources outside of business hours.
- Pro Tip: Use Flexera's automation policies to automatically terminate non-compliant or untagged resources in development environments after a certain period. This enforces good governance and prevents orphaned resources from accumulating costs.
17. Replex
Replex is a FinOps platform that provides strong capabilities in both multi-cloud and Kubernetes cost management. It helps organizations gain visibility and govern their cloud spend by providing detailed cost allocation, showback, and chargeback functionalities.
Developers can benefit from Replex's ability to provide a "cost-per-environment" or "cost-per-feature-branch" view. This level of granularity helps you understand the financial impact of your day-to-day work. The platform also offers rightsizing and waste-reduction recommendations tailored to your specific workloads.
- Example: Before a major release, your team can use Replex to compare the cost of the new infrastructure in the staging environment against the current production environment, providing a reasonable forecast of the expected cost increase post-launch.
18. CloudZero
CloudZero is a cloud cost intelligence platform that shifts the conversation from "How much are we spending?" to "Why are we spending it?" It focuses on mapping costs to business outcomes and providing high-resolution unit cost analysis (e.g., cost per feature, per customer, per API call).
This is a paradigm shift for developers. Instead of just seeing a bill for "EC2," you can see that the new recommendation engine feature costs $0.01 per active user. This allows you to have intelligent conversations about architectural trade-offs, performance improvements, and feature pricing based on real, tangible data.
- Pro Tip: Work with your product team to define a key unit cost metric for your service in CloudZero. Then, set a goal to reduce that unit cost by 10% in the next quarter, driving targeted engineering efforts toward efficiency.
Conclusion: It's Your Move
The days of developers throwing code over the wall and letting someone else worry about the cost are over. In the cloud-native world, engineers are in the driver's seat of cloud consumption, and with great power comes great responsibility. As Goh Ling Yong often advises, taking ownership of your service's operational health now includes its financial health.
You don't need to become a financial expert, but you do need visibility. The right FinOps platform can transform the cloud bill from a mysterious, scary document into an actionable feedback loop that helps you build better, more efficient software.
Whether you start with a native tool like AWS Cost Explorer, a "shift-left" champion like Infracost, or a Kubernetes master like Kubecost, the first step is to start looking. You can't optimize what you can't see. Pick a tool, connect it to your environment, and start asking questions. Your budget (and your finance team) will thank you.
What FinOps platforms are you using to keep your cloud costs in check? Did I miss your favorite tool? Drop a comment below and share your experience
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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