Startup Finout offers FinOps to stop SaaS spend disasters

Sticking an Ops on the tail end of abbreviated things like development and data and finance is cool in these containerized cloud-native times, as in DevOps and DataOps and FinOps.

One startup is positioning it as the best way to deal with the uncontrollable chaos that is cloud-delivered service spending, the catastrophically complicated world of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. The pay-for-what-you-use, spin up instances with a credit card experience of AWS et al.

It can be complicated dealing with business travel. Dealing with airlines and their fares, classes, timetables and flight destinations is a royal pain in the neck. That’s why intermediaries like AMEX Travel Services have sprung up. These analgesics of the business travel industry take much of the pain away. They’ll arrange flights and give you spending reports for budget checking and planning and turn air travel chaos into something approaching normality.

Paying for cloud service is on another level. Sticker shock is endemic. Instead of dealing with thousands of flights and fares and whatnot you’re faced with millions of instances and costs across all the public cloud and SaaS providers. This is nickel and diming on an interplanetary scale. 

Finout’s pitch is that we need organizations equivalent to AMEX TS that understand this nightmarish Byzantine cloud-native system of charging and make sense of it so business finance department staff don’t get the daily shock of: “You spent how much?” and trying to explain to the CFO why the monthly cloud spend exceeded budget by 350 percent – again!

Startup Finout’s co-founder, CEO Roi Ravhon, experienced this constantly irritating need to explain and justify cloud service spending when working for previous companies. He told us there were no tools to do it and he had to dig deep into the charging practices and invoices of the many as-a-Service suppliers his employer used to understand why bills were so high and how the spend had taken place.

And then he realized that the cloud-native, DevOps environment had contributed to cloud charging and cost confusion and it could help solve it too. He and co-founder Chief Product Officer Asaf Liveanu started Finout in Tel Aviv in 2021. They raised $4.5 million seed funding that year and ran a $14 million A-round in 2022, to raise $18.5 million in two years, plus non-equity assistance from Deloitte Launchpad to develop their software very fast. The company told us it has dozens of paying customers already.

What they tapped into was a need for an intermediary cloud cost handling company. They told an IT Press Tour that Netflix has a huge FinOps department, as does Tesla. The whole FinOps area is so primitive compared to business travel services, but it’s also dealing with multi-million dollar cloud spending totals. Financial discipline and control is desperately needed.

Finout is a SaaS service, based on AWS, that presents its clients with a single bill totalling all their cloud spend, which it says can be microscopically analyzed through a customizable dashboard to identify who spent how much on what services; AWS instances, snowflake analytics runs, Datadog, and Kubernetes. 

It has these suppliers’ pricing and charging policies built in, and can bill elements to a client company’s departments or by a development project, along with its views of how they are ordering and using cloud services. Finout’s CostGuard function provides an idle resource locator and recommendations. It can identify little or un-used cloud resources and alert clients about this. For example, if a customer is paying for a Redshift database instance they’re not using, or it can identify unused cores and memory in Kubernetes deployments. Clients can then stop provisioning them and save money.

Finout RDS spending chart

The company says it can enrich cost data to show how costs of internal business things like teams, functions, and SaaS elements are taking place and changing. Virtual tagging can provide showback items for internal chargeback. It can be told about a client company’s profit parameters and relate service spend items, such as developing a product variation, to profit goals. This is useful to MSPs and SaaS suppliers as well as biz users. They could calculate, for example, profitability per customer or per project.

The software provides cost anomaly detection, noting a sudden ramp up in cloud service item spending cost compared to a baseline with daily run levels and policy-set parameters. 

Finout supports AWS, Kubernetes and Datadog now. It will soon support GCP and Azure, and Snowflake. SAP support is a roadmap item.

It doesn’t make recommendations across cloud providers; this is a possible future roadmap item. Rav-hon said: ”We don’t want to fight with AWS or whoever. It’s going to a while before it comes.”

He told us: “We can integrate new source vendors to Megabill in a few hours, ie, adding Databricks. We have a base cost model and adding a connector to new vendors is relatively easy.”

Finout dashboard.

Finout plans to support major vendors, but not tens of thousands of individual SaaS suppliers. Customers can add vendors to their Megabill if they wish, and a SaaS supplier could contact Finout directly about this.

In effect, Roi Ravhon has built a tool that tries to solve a cloud service Opex supply cost calculation problem he had in a previous company. Finout is intended to enable Capex style budget control for Opex cloud services. It could be the equivalent of Amex Travel Services in the cloud services spending world and enable organizations to worry much less about rampant cloud service spend overruns.