Finout - Enterprise Grade FinOps: Unified Cloud and AI Cost Intelligence

Our use case is integrating cloud costs from a multi-cloud estate to have one pane of glass for cost visibility. We use it for reports, but there's also other functionality that we've liked using, such as anomaly alerts, looking at the asset inventory, and setting budgets for different cloud accounts.

I like the virtual tags feature of Finout , which is like business mappings within Cloudability , which is one of their competitors. Virtual tags work really well because you can specify them without changing the configuration of cloud accounts directly. It's a filtering mechanism that's specifically within Finout  and can be fully managed there.

It makes it easier to group cloud accounts into a specific bucket. For example, an engineering team might own five different cloud accounts. Rather than them having to change their code to tag them all to their team, we can instead use the virtual tags feature within Finout to have a layer of abstraction over the top. This makes it easier and allows us to manage it, rather than having to burden engineers to manage the tags of their own accounts.

Finout, being a FinOps tool, leads to cost reductions within cloud spend, which is great. By looking at how much cost is spent over time, you can then figure out different areas to reduce your cost and make it more efficient. We've definitely found that from our FinOps tool usage.

From using the cost anomaly feature, you can very quickly see when costs are getting out of control. We've used cost anomaly alerts in our FinOps tools to look for costs that are too high and then make sure that they can be reduced. There have been situations where costs get out of control, we use that feature, and then we're able to cut them down. By using that, you can definitely cut down anomalous costs by anywhere from twenty to fifty percent if you catch it quickly enough.

In terms of money saved, organizations could very easily save anywhere from ten to thirty percent of their cloud costs. That's through anomaly alerts, detecting costs that are getting too high and making sure that they're controlled, building out reports and dashboards to track costs and make them more efficient, and then potentially using the reservations and right sizing features to directly reduce cost.

The right sizing feature is okay. It could be used, but I feel its functionality isn't as strong as the cloud-native solutions, so GCP, AWS , and Azure . They all have better right sizing capabilities, so you probably wouldn't carry out right sizing from Finout. You'd want to do it directly in the cloud platforms.

The right sizing feature needs more development. Also, the reservations analysis feature isn't quite detailed enough as it should be. If you're making purchasing decisions based off of a cloud tool, it's probably better right now to do it directly through the cloud-native tooling rather than through Finout.

Those are the two features where I feel they could be improved. It's a great tool, but it does have those two areas of improvement in the right sizing and the reservation sections. If those sections were functioning very well and were very deep, then I would give it a ten out of ten.

I've used Finout over the last two years.

Finout is very stable. I've not noticed any issues with it.

Finout is very scalable. If an organization had hundreds of cloud accounts or thousands, it would easily scale to that, so there would be no scalability issues.

The people I've interacted with from Finout have been very helpful.

I've used other cloud FinOps solutions before, for example, using GCP, AWS , and Azure 's integrated FinOps tooling. Those have been good tools. The reason for using Finout is having all costs from different cloud providers into one platform is highly beneficial.

Finout was being compared directly against the cloud provider integrated tooling, so that's GCP, AWS, and Azure.

Interactions have been directly with the vendor rather than through the marketplace.

I would recommend them to use it. It's a good tool. The company is still quite new and young, but they're rapidly developing, and their support is great.

The Finout team seemed like they could be flexible on the pricing, which is good. No complaints there. They were quite interested in securing new business while not overwhelming the customer with cost. Because they're a newer and smaller FinOps company, they're more interested in getting customers on board rather than charging high costs, which is good for customers. I would give this product a rating of nine out of ten.