[esafak]

I think you are swimming adjacent to usage-based pricing products like stigg. They also keep track of usage, and though their focus is not on what it costs you, that follows readily from usage.

Are you thinking of expanding in that direction, or integrating with such products? I would look favorably at a product that combined pricing (them) and observability (you). You're solving basically the same problem; don't make me buy two products.

[ashug]

Great point. We could definitely add usage-based pricing (UBP) adjacent features - for example, a Stripe integration and user-defined rules to auto-calculate invoices based on incurred cloud usage per-customer. Would that be useful?

However, it's not always possible to infer one's own costs from UBP events. In UBP products, the user defines what constitutes a "usage event" (e.g. "customer generates a PDF") and so these events can be quite disconnected from underlying cloud usage. In other words, there's nothing that prevents some "someone generated a PDF" events from incurring large amounts of EC2 usage while other "someone generated a PDF" events incur very little EC2 usage, depending on the input parameters to the workload. And in most UBP scenarios, this difference in underlying cloud usage from PDF generation to PDF generation is not taken into account; often all UBP events of a given type are billed at the same rate. In fact, we've seen this exact issue in the wild: namely, a company implementing UBP but still being unsure about profit margin because certain UBP event types had high variance in cloud usage per-event.

One company is planning to use Dashdive's S3 storage data to charge their customers based on usage, so in some cases the data we collect can serve as a substitute for UBP.

I agree that it would be more convenient if we also offered user-defined UBP events. This way, we could be a single vendor for the folks that want both usage monitoring and usage-based billing, where the UBP events don't necessarily align super well with underlying cloud usage.

[esafak]

Excellent points. Now that I think about it, I think the two products are naturally offered together, because usage-based pricing should be based on underlying costs, monitoring which is what you provide. If you had better visibility into your costs, you could set usage-based prices, and price tiers in a more principled manner.