Dashdive — Break down cloud costs by feature, team and customer

Dashdive continuously attributes AWS, GCP, Azure and other cloud services costs to the responsible feature, product, team and customer. These data help companies understand who and what are driving their costs, which allows them to make optimal strategic decisions about pricing, resource allocation and cloud architecture.

Problem

Most software companies don’t know how much it costs to serve each of their customers with each of their products. Cloud costs, which are typically a tech company’s primary driver of COGS, can vary significantly even on a per-unit basis, i.e. irrespective of volume.

Without per-customer and per-feature cost information, companies can’t reliably know:

1. What’s our margin on Customer A?
2. What’s our margin on Product B?
3. Which usage events drove Customer C’s costs last month?
4. What’s it going to cost us to serve new Customer D?

Normally, if an engineering or finance team wants to know the answer to one of these questions, they have to either 1) make an estimate that could be wildly inaccurate based on average total costs or 2) “track down an engineer to run experiments in AWS.” (That was a direct quote from a CFO.)

Solution

These data allow companies to:

1. Know if they’re pricing an existing customer too low—or below cost.
2. Hone in on individual lines of code and architectural decisions that incur disproportionate costs. (Other tools can only give generic cost-cutting recommendations based on total costs, e.g. “consider reserving storage in advance for a discount,” since they just repackage existing AWS billing data.)
3. Give customers who complain about high bills or opaque pricing an adequate explanation (and perhaps even suggested usage patterns to reduce future bills).
4. Better forecast the cost of serving a new customer based on expected usage. This helps teams price contracts optimally to hit margin goals consistently.

Setup

Get in touch

Inquiries can be sent to team@dashdive.com.

Dashdive's founders met in college at Stanford. Bringing strategy and sales experience, Micah worked at the Boston Consulting Group. Adam (left) developed his engineering background at Palantir and Apple.

Dashdive was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 Batch.