Cloud spend doesn’t break your infra, it breaks your focus.
At Pennylane, a next-generation accounting platform built to simplify financial management, cloud cost visibility had become a growing distraction. As AWS and Datadog costs scaled, so did internal friction. Senior infrastructure engineers were spending too much time explaining cloud cost drivers, time that could have gone into optimizing systems or shipping improvements.
Cloud Became the Second-Largest Cost, But There Was No Clear Ownership
Cloud had become one of Pennylane’s biggest operating expenses, yet accountability was scattered across teams.
- Engineering, Finance, and Product each built their own reports to make sense of cloud spend
- There was no single source of truth and no clear owner for understanding or explaining cost fluctuations
- Alignment around cloud cost was fragmented and reactive
For example: Finance looked at total cost variations, focusing on overall spend evolution, while engineering teams analyzed unit costs per project, often broken down by dozens of custom tags. This mismatch made it difficult to align on a shared narrative around cost changes, leading to fragmented understanding and inconsistent decision-making.
That’s when Pennylane implemented Costory.
Costory Helps Engineering Focus on Infrastructure, Not Reporting
Cloud cost management is just one of many responsibilities handled by the DevOps team. Each month, they spent several hours preparing for Pennylane’s internal cost reportings.
Before Costory, their workflow involved:
- Navigating the AWS Billing Console, Datadog usage reports, GitHub activity, and spreadsheets maintained by Finance to investigate trends and spikes. This was time-consuming and required engineers to try multiple breakdowns and jump across tools just to understand what was going on.
- Monitoring the impact of past remediation or optimization initiatives.
- Manually updating Notion pages and writing executive summaries for leadership.
- Struggling to generate reliable cost forecasts, with limited visibility for DevOps teams into how engineering decisions translated into future budget impact.
With Costory:
- Engineers now use a unified interface to correlate cost changes with GitHub activity, Datadog metrics, and external business events
- The ability to overlay events on cost trends, originally suggested by the Pennylane team, makes it much faster to tie cost shifts to releases or incidents and saves countless hours
- Engineers use Costory’s Digest feature to break down AWS and Datadog costs through an intuitive tree structure, filtering out irrelevant data and zooming into specific dimensions like Kubernetes namespaces running on EC2. This focused cost view forms the foundation for monthly cost steering committees.
“Cost communication is part of the infrastructure function but it shouldn’t come at the cost of velocity. With Costory, we tie spend to business and engineering impact in minutes, not hours. That keeps the team focused on delivery, not reporting.”
Andrei Dumitra, Senior Software Engineer, Pennylane
Finance Gets Context Without Chasing Down Engineers
Costory fit into Pennylane’s existing workflows. Instead of introducing new tooling or adding friction, it delivered proactive, structured insights right where teams already work.
- Slack-based automated reports tailored to each team’s needs
- External business data like client acquisition volume or scanned documents via OCR is used for contextualization and forecasting
- Engineers are no longer interrupted with ad-hoc questions and Finance has the clarity they need to make decisions independently
“Before Costory, we kept asking engineers to explain what was driving AWS and Datadog costs. It wasn’t efficient for anyone. Now, we get the right insights automatically through Slack. We’ve been able to track key metrics like infra cost per client, which dropped by 26%. That kind of visibility helps Finance understand where the money goes and gives credit to the infra team for the impact of their work.”
Raphaël Nahum, Head of Finance, Pennylane
What Costory Means for Engineering Leadership
For Infrastructure and Platform leaders, cloud spend is more than a line item. It’s a visibility and prioritization challenge. Without the right tooling, engineers become default report writers and budget interpreters.
Costory changes that:
- Frees up your best engineers to focus on delivering customer value and avoids unnecessary context switching
- Saves time on internal reporting and cross-functional alignment
- Gives engineers cost insights in the context of code, infra, and business operations
- Maintains trust with Finance, Product, and the rest of the organization without constant Slack pings
If cloud spend is near the top of your expense list, it’s time to measure and manage it without burning engineering time.