Not all cost increases are a problem. More customers, higher traffic, or new workloads will naturally increase cloud spend. But when finance reviews the bill, that nuance is usually lost.
Engineering needs a way to link cost increases to business growth and defend scaling decisions.
Challenges
Without business context:
- Infra teams are penalized for growth-driven spend
- Finance lacks metrics to validate ROI on cloud investments
- There’s no way to quantify efficiency gains over time
Marginal cost — like cost per user, cost per GB processed, or cost per transaction — isn’t visible in cloud billing tools.
How Costory Helps
Costory allows you to ingest business or usage metrics into the same interface as your cloud cost data. Supported sources include:
- Datadog
- BigQuery, Parquet, CSV
- Spreadsheets or APIs
Once imported, teams can define unit economics like:
- Cost per active customer
- Storage cost per document
- Lambda cost per OCR job
These metrics can be visualized over time and scoped by team, product, or region.
Benefits
- Quantifies infra efficiency with unit KPIs
- Enables better communication with finance around ROI
- Validates investments in performance and architecture
- Helps defend scaling-related cost increases
