We’ve long been known for our hot takes on cloud at Duckbill, and here’s the hottest one: the cloud isn’t expensive.

“Expensive” implies a judgment, a comparison. If cloud is expensive, what’s it expensive compared to? Every argument we’ve heard is one considered in isolation, rather than in the full context of the business.

Cloud spending isn’t inherently wasteful. It’s entirely proper to be deliberately aggressive with cloud consumption if it enables faster time-to-market, supports rapid scaling, or frees up engineers to focus on product development rather than infrastructure.

The state of FinOps tooling today is missing the forest for the trees. It’s like everyone started with “wow, cloud bills are big, wouldn’t it be great if they were smaller?” and drove right past whether that even actually matters.

We don’t think it does.

We’re at war with complexity

Business leadership doesn’t really care whether the cloud bill is $1m or $100m in isolation. They care whether they can predict it. They care about healthy gross margins. They care about having a meaningful ability to influence the numbers. A business can easily work with a large, predictable expense. What keeps executives up at night are expenses that move in ways they can’t explain, forecast, or control.

This is the problem consumption-based billing created.

A data center is financially boring in the best way. You buy racks of servers every three to five years. It’s a known quantity.

Cloud infrastructure changed that. Now infrastructure cost is a function of customer behavior, engineering decisions, market conditions. Seriously: the need for companies like ours is an indictment of the complexity this billing model created. AWS alone has 2.3 million SKUs, all metered by the hour.

A one-time $1M capital expense, a $100K/year subscription, $375 per user per month: finance can model all of these. But “it depends on how many API calls we get” is something else entirely.

And it’s not just cloud infrastructure anymore, either. More vendors are moving to consumption-based pricing every day, making the problem substantially worse.

Cloud cost management is more than finding savings

When we look at the work our customers actually do day-to-day, cost reduction work is a small slice of it.

Instead, they’re:

• building budgets, what-if scenarios, and adjusting forecasts
• investigating variances between actual spend and projections
• consulting with engineering teams on how planned product changes will affect the bill
• creating enablement materials
• advising on governance
• negotiating with vendors
• handling invoicing and internal chargebacks
• improving KPI measurement and stakeholder reporting

The industry has built tools for finding savings but left practitioners to figure out the other 90% on their own. That’s a real shame.

Skyway: Cloud Cost Management For the Nine Figure Club

As we’ve hammered on in this post, we believe the fundamental problem of enterprise cost management isn’t minimizing the size of bills. It’s making consumption and spend data explorable, predictable, and actionable across the entire organization for a variety of use cases. And not just for cloud, but all infrastructure: Databricks, Anthropic, Snowflake, New Relic. We’re aiming for complete coverage of every vendor, not just AWS/GCP/Azure.

Finance needs this data for budgeting and forecasting.

Engineering needs it for optimization and architectural decisions.

Procurement needs it for demand planning and negotiation.

Product needs it to understand unit economics.

FinOps needs it to play their role of conductor across all of these use cases.

These are different questions asked by different people with different mental models—and none of them are well-served by a dashboard telling you to shut off some idle instances.

Meeting these needs across dozens of providers, serving hundreds of stakeholders, requires a data platform—not piecemeal, app-based point solutions.

We’re designing Skyway to be an open integration point inside of a business’s existing processes and tools, not a walled garden. We know we can never pry a spreadsheet out of anyone’s hands, so we’re not even going to try. Instead, we’re providing the entire business with more reliable data in an easier, quicker, and cheaper way.

Skyway’s Contract Manager

We have a lot on our roadmap and our first module, Contract Manager, is available for customers now.

Contract Manager turns cloud private pricing contracts into structured data, alongside your cloud consumption and billing data. This enables you to:

• measure private pricing commitment performance
• validate you’re receiving your discounts and that your bill is correct
• track individual discount impact
• manage credit attestations
• identify new private pricing discount opportunities
• enable the renewal and negotiation process

We’ve raised $7.75m to build our vision

To help build our vision of a better future, we’re also announcing that we’ve raised a $7.75m seed round from Joseph Ruscio at Heavybit, Andy McLoughlin at Uncork Capital, and Alex Benik at Encoded Ventures.

We’re further supported by some delightful angel investors who are excited to back our mission, including Mark Imbriaco (Head of Engineering at Railway, former Sr. Director of Engineering at Epic Games, VP Tech Ops at Digital Ocean), Adam Gross (founder/former CEO of Heroku), David Singleton (CEO of /dev/agents, former CTO of Stripe), Brian Hall (former VP Product Marketing at Google Cloud and AWS), and other notable leaders from companies including AWS, Airbnb, Instacart, Block, Confluent, Epic Games, and Cribl.