When Corey and I started The Duckbill Group in 2019, we felt like we were late to the party and everyone was walking out the door.

We were the only consulting firm focused solely on cost management, and it felt like no one really cared. On the software side, everyone was still talking about Cloudability and CloudHealth, as both had only recently been acquired. AWS was at a $29bn/yr run-rate then ($130bn/yr now, for comparison!) and GCP/Azure were tiny by comparison—in fact, we worked with the #1 GCP customer in 2019 and they were “only” $100m/yr. It felt like the peak had already happened, and we had missed it.

Despite that, we quickly became the go-to for everyone who cared… but, honestly, not a lot of people cared.

Slowly, then suddenly and all at once

Then 2020 hit, and we were slammed with more than we could handle. We even threw our own hat in the ring on an ill-fated SaaS idea, but quickly concluded that market wasn’t for us. So, we doubled-down on being the absolute best at enterprise cloud cost management.

By the time we came up for air in 2022, ZIRP was over, and we were surrounded by dozens—hundreds!–of companies focused on cloud cost management. Now, there are 150+ SaaS companies working on cloud costs to some degree and more launching every day. Quite the shift from where things were in 2019.

Opinions are like assholes

And boy, do we have both in spades.

Having watched many of these companies launching (and folding, as has often been the case), we’ve had a lot of opinions on the right way to solve these problems. For a while, many of the SaaS cost management companies would ask our advice but be unhappy with our feedback, and ultimately just go back to building what they were already thinking.

Last year Corey asked me a question: how much do we really believe we’re right about this? No other company on the market sees the world as we do and if we really do believe in our own vision, we should build it—or just shut up.

Introducing Skyway

Today we’re launching Skyway, the first cost management platform built exclusively for those companies who are actually at-scale and spending $100m/yr+. For the past year, we’ve been quietly building the first piece of what is a much larger vision.

The first of many product modules to come, Skyway’s Contract Manager encodes everything we’ve learned from negotiating tens of billions in cloud contracts, enabling FinOps, procurement, and Finance to manage contract commitments, calculate discounts, validate you’re actually getting those discounts, negotiate renewals, and proactively identify ways to improve the contract.

Skyway’s Contract Manager is available in private access now. If you’re interested in learning more, head on over to the Skyway page and send us a note.

It’s just Duckbill now

As part of all this, we’re also announcing our rebrand from The Duckbill Group to simply Duckbill, as a reflection of our transition from a pure consulting firm to a services and software company.

Our new branding reflects the values Duckbill has come to represent: our customers trust us to guide them to the right answers every time, enabling them to become true masters of their business.

Editor’s Note: Last Week in AWS and our beloved Billie the Platypus aren’t going anywhere.

New ways to support our customers

The services you’ve all come to know and rely on aren’t going anywhere. In fact, we’ve greatly expanded our capabilities: we now advise on Google Cloud and Azure, and will be expanding our reach into other major SaaS and AI platforms such as Datadog, Anthropic, OpenAI, Snowflake, and Databricks soon. (All of these will be part of Skyway in due time!)

Beyond our expansion of capabilities, we’ve simplified how to work with us:

On behalf of the entire Duckbill team, it’s been an incredible 7 years, and we’re looking forward to serving you all for many more years to come.