A large part of the FinOps tooling market is priced as a percentage of the cloud spend it monitors — commonly 2% to 3%, sometimes billed as a share of the savings it claims to find. It is worth stating the incentive plainly, because it is structurally backwards: a vendor paid a percentage of your bill earns more every time your bill goes up. The tool you hired to shrink a number is compensated for that number growing.
The math at scale
The percentage sounds small until you attach it to a real bill:
- At $200K/month of cloud spend, 2.5% is $5,000/month — $60K/year to watch a dashboard.
- At $500K/month, the same 2.5% is $12,500/month — $150K/year, and it rises automatically as you grow.
- Every dollar of new spend — a launch, a migration, a busy quarter — quietly raises the invoice, with no new value delivered for the increase.
Savings-based pricing has the same problem in friendlier clothing: the vendor is now incentivized to claim credit for savings, inflate the baseline they measure against, and count reductions you would have made anyway.
What flat pricing changes
CloudQuell charges a flat monthly fee that does not move with your bill. Our incentive is to keep you subscribed by being useful, which means helping your spend go down. When we surface a commitment or a rightsizing move that cuts your bill 15%, our price is unchanged and your return on the subscription just improved. That is the alignment you want from a cost tool.
What it actually costs
Free under $10K/month of cloud spend, with the core dashboard and two seats. Starter is $99/month and adds anomalies, alerts, Slack and Microsoft Teams, and tag-based allocation. Growth is $199/month and adds more seats and longer retention. High-spend orgs above $200K/month are on Scale — custom, but still flat, never a percentage. Annual billing takes 17% off. The number on the invoice is the number you agreed to, whether your cloud bill doubles or halves.
Start free under $10K/month of cloud spend — flat price, never a percentage of your bill.
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