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How It Works
Cloud bills are not a single line item. They are the sum of many individual cost drivers, each of which reflects a decision made somewhere in the organization. Common cost drivers include compute instance size and count, data transfer volume, storage capacity and access frequency, database usage, and the number of environments running at any given time. On AWS, services like EC2, RDS, and data transfer fees are frequently the largest drivers. Azure equivalents include Virtual Machines, Azure SQL, and egress charges. On GCP, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and network egress serve the same role. Identifying which drivers are responsible for the most spend is the first step toward controlling a cloud budget.
Why It Matters for Cloud Cost
Without visibility into cost drivers, finance and engineering teams make budget decisions in the dark. Spend grows faster than expected, and by the time the bill arrives, the waste is already weeks old. Uncontrolled cost drivers compound over time. A single over-provisioned instance class left running across dozens of services can quietly add hundreds of thousands of dollars to an annual bill before anyone flags it. Teams that track cost drivers by service, team, and workload can prioritize optimization efforts where they will have the most impact, rather than cutting broadly and risking performance.
ClearCost provides visibility and showback reporting across AWS, GCP, and Azure, giving finance and engineering teams a shared view of cloud spend by team or business unit.