Used For

• +**Your $50K monthly AWS bill has zero cost visibility by team** → See exactly which department's Kubernetes cluster is eating 40% of your budget
• +**You're manually tagging resources for 3 hours every month and still missing half** → Virtual tagging through the UI assigns costs even when engineers forget tags
• +**Idle resources are burning money but you can't find them** → Flags clusters running under 50% CPU and containers nobody's using
• +Ask questions in plain English like "which team drove our EC2 spike last month" - no SQL required
• +Tracks cost per customer for SaaS companies - finally know if that enterprise client is actually profitable

Best For

• >Your AWS bill hit six figures and nobody knows who's spending what
• >Teams keep spinning up resources and forgetting about them
• >Finance wants to charge back cloud costs but everything's a shared mess

Not For

• -Companies spending under $100K/month on cloud - you're paying enterprise prices for overkill
• -Solo developers or teams under 20 people - basic AWS billing alerts are fine for you
• -Anyone wanting plug-and-play simplicity - this needs engineering time to instrument your apps properly

Pairs With

• *AWS Cost Explorer (CloudZero shows the why behind the spikes that Cost Explorer flags)
• *Kubernetes (to actually see which namespaces and pods are burning through your cluster budget)
• *Snowflake (tracks your data warehouse costs alongside compute - both love eating money quietly)
• *Slack (where you'll get alerts about cost anomalies and can finally @ the right team)
• *Terraform (to tag new infrastructure properly so CloudZero can track it automatically)
• *DataDog (for performance monitoring while CloudZero handles the money side of your infrastructure)

The Catch

• !Setup looks easy but instrumenting custom metrics for SaaS cost-per-customer takes 2-4 hours of developer time
• !The AI advisor is cool but you'll still need someone who understands your architecture to interpret the insights
• !No public pricing means you're in for the enterprise sales dance with custom quotes

Bottom Line

Splits your massive cloud bills by team and product without needing perfect tagging from day one.