Used For

• +**Your cloud bill spiked 40% from idle EC2 instances nobody owns** → Auto-detects and terminates forgotten dev resources, drops your bill back to normal
• +**Finance wants cost breakdowns by team but everything's untagged** → Groups spending by project automatically, no more spreadsheet archaeology
• +**Dev environments run 24/7 costing $20k/month** → Sets policies to auto-shutdown after hours, saves 60-70% on non-prod costs
• +Forecasts next month's bill with 95% accuracy - no more budget surprises
• +Connects to Slack for real-time alerts when spending hits thresholds

Best For

• >Your AWS bill jumped $30k and nobody knows why
• >Dev teams spin up clusters costing $5k/week without budgets
• >You're manually auditing cloud costs for 15 hours every week

Not For

• -Teams under 20 people or spending less than $10k/month on cloud - the setup time outweighs the savings
• -Companies wanting something free - starts at $10k/year commitment and usage overages add up fast
• -Teams heavily reliant on custom cost scripts - Vantage's optimizations are opinionated and might conflict

Pairs With

• *Slack (where your team gets cost alerts and complains about dev environments being shut down)
• *AWS Cost Explorer (Vantage makes it actually useful instead of a confusing mess of charts)
• *Jira (to create tickets for optimization recommendations that require manual fixes)
• *Kubernetes (for container-level cost breakdowns, though setup takes 5+ hours of SQL hacks)
• *Terraform (to implement the infrastructure policies Vantage recommends)
• *DataDog (combines performance monitoring with Vantage's cost data for right-sizing decisions)

The Catch

• !Free tier tricks you - caps at single cloud account and $10k/month, then forces annual $12k commitment
• !UI gets sluggish with 100+ accounts, dashboards take 10-20 seconds to load for multi-cloud setups
• !API exports cost $0.01 per 1,000 rows - adds up to $100/month if you're a heavy data user

Bottom Line

Finds the 20-30% of your cloud bill you're wasting on ghost resources and forgotten dev environments.