Traditionally, our industry has taken a reactive approach to managing cloud costs. Infrastructure is provisioned, costs are incurred, and only a month or more later a large bill arrives, breaking budgets. Then we go back to engineering and spend more time fixing it. Engineers become frustrated with the rework, and money has already been spent.

Infracost shifts cloud costs left, before the infrastructure is provisioned. It sits in the engineering workflow (GitHub, GitLab, CI/CD), and when someone makes a Terraform code change that will impact cloud costs, they are prompted with a checkout screen. This allows them to be aware of the cost impact before any money has been spent. From a central SaaS product, FinOps can set budget guardrails and policies to ensure that code stays within budget and complies with policies. Reports can be made and exported to BI systems to report on all the changes that have been made across the organization to the code base, by which teams and individuals, and the cost impact over time.