Vantage

Vantage is an independent cloud cost observability and optimization platform that aggregates infrastructure costs across providers into a centralized view of total cloud spend and supports FinOps workflows and cost governance. The platform has more than a dozen native integrations, including AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Datadog, Snowflake and Databricks, with additional coverage of services such as Fastly, New Relic and MongoDB.

Product capabilities fall into three areas: finding savings (AutoPilot automated buying of savings plans, cost recommendations, Kubernetes rightsizing and cross-provider recommendations); preventing overruns (anomaly detection, custom cost alerts and budget alerts); and building FinOps practice (virtual tagging, network flow reports, unit costs, budgets and financial commitment reports, plus Slack, Jira and Microsoft Teams integrations). A Kubernetes agent collects granular metrics to break down compute by namespace and label, identify pod waste and cluster idle costs, and generate rightsizing recommendations. A Terraform provider allows every Vantage resource to be managed as code, and an API provides programmatic access to pricing and reporting resources.

Vantage also positions for AI-era spend: it tracks AI provider costs and offers hosted and local MCP Server support so tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Cursor can query a customer's cost and usage data. The company maintains free and largely open-source community resources, including EC2Instances.info for AWS instance pricing comparison, an LLM model comparison tool, the Cloud Cost Handbook, cur.vantage.sh for decoding AWS Cost and Usage Report billing codes, a Slack community, and quarterly Cloud Cost Reports built from anonymized data across thousands of connected accounts.

Founding story

Co-founders Ben Schaechter and Brooke McKim, former product leaders at DigitalOcean and Amazon Web Services, started the company in 2020 with the initial idea of building a better AWS dashboard. The dashboard they built to visualize AWS spend became the near-exclusive focus of the team and the basis for the broader cost management platform.

Business model

Vantage sells a SaaS cloud cost management platform to companies whose infrastructure spend is material, with self-service sign-up alongside a sales-assisted enterprise motion. In addition to platform subscriptions, its AutoPilot feature for managing financial commitments such as savings plans is charged at 5% of the cost savings it generates for the customer.

Subscription-based access to the cloud cost management platform, with a free sign-up tier, plus performance-based pricing on the AutoPilot commitment-management feature charged at 5% of generated savings.

Traction

At the time of its March 2023 Series A, Vantage reported more than 300 customers managing over $1 billion in annual cloud costs across more than 10,000 connected infrastructure accounts, and said it was cash flow positive. The company now cites thousands of connected accounts and organizations globally, more than $25 million in total funding, and headcount of roughly 75-79.

Latest developments

Recent product direction centers on AI: tracking spend across AI providers with stated day-one support for new services, and integrating cost data with LLM tools via hosted and local MCP Server support for ChatGPT, Claude and Cursor. The company continues to expand Kubernetes efficiency tooling and FinOps-as-code capabilities and is hiring across sales, customer success and product marketing.