Rosettic: A Game-Changing Solution for Cloud Cost Optimization

As cloud computing has become an integral part of most tech companies, cloud costs have emerged as a major challenge. It is not uncommon for companies to incur exorbitant cloud bills, even for the same products and services. Unfortunately, most companies don't have a clear picture of how much it costs to serve each of their customers with each of their products. This problem is what Rosettic, a San Francisco-based start-up, is solving. Rosettic breaks down AI and cloud costs by feature and customer, enabling companies to optimize their pricing and evaluate the profitability of each product. In this article, we'll dive deeper into Rosettic, exploring its mission, solution, and benefits.

What is Rosettic?

Rosettic is a cloud cost optimization tool that attributes AWS, GCP, and Azure costs to features, products, teams, and customers. This attribution helps companies understand how their profitability breaks down by product and customer, allowing them to make optimal strategic decisions about pricing, resource allocation, and cloud architecture. Rosettic's founders met at Stanford University, and they bring strategy, sales, and engineering experience from top-tier firms like Boston Consulting Group, Palantir, and Apple.

What is the problem that Rosettic is solving?

Most tech companies face the challenge of managing cloud costs. Cloud costs are typically a tech company's second-largest cost (after personnel), and they can vary significantly even on a per-unit basis, i.e., irrespective of volume. Most companies don't know how much it costs to serve each of their customers with each of their products. Without per-customer and per-product cost information, companies can't reliably know their margins on each customer or product. They can't pinpoint the usage events that drive their customers' costs or forecast the cost of serving a new customer based on expected usage. This information gap makes it difficult for finance, sales, and pricing teams to make informed decisions and optimizations. In the absence of granular cloud cost data, companies can only make estimates based on average total costs or rely on engineers to run experiments on AWS, which is both time-consuming and inaccurate.

What is Rosettic's solution?

Rosettic's solution is designed to help companies answer important questions about their cloud costs on a per-product and per-customer basis. By monitoring backend services with lightweight agents, Rosettic's solution attributes the activity on each cloud service to specific features and customers using distributed tracing and continuous profiling. The usage data is then mapped to cost data via AWS/GCP/Azure billing APIs, providing a complete picture of who and what are driving cloud costs over time.

This granular cloud cost data allows companies to determine whether they are pricing an existing customer too low or below cost, hone in on individual lines of code and architectural decisions that incur disproportionate costs, and better forecast the cost of serving a new customer based on expected usage. By providing this information, Rosettic enables teams to price contracts optimally to hit margin goals consistently.

Setup

One of the key advantages of Rosettic's solution is its ease of setup. Installation only involves deploying Rosettic agents to each service of interest, which takes five minutes and requires zero code changes. Although Rosettic's backend is cloud-based by default, it can be self-hosted for companies that need to keep all data within their ecosystem.

For example, setting up Rosettic for AWS Lambda, a popular cloud service, is a straightforward process. After creating a Rosettic account and generating an API key, the next step is to create an IAM role for Rosettic to access your AWS account. Once the role is created, Rosettic provides a CloudFormation template to deploy their agent as a Lambda layer. Once the agent is deployed, it automatically starts collecting data, which is then sent to Rosettic's backend for analysis and reporting.

How does Rosettic work?

Rosettic's setup is simple, involving the deployment of Rosettic agents to each service of interest. This process takes only five minutes and requires zero code changes. Although the backend is cloud-based by default, Rosettic can be self-hosted for companies that need to keep all data within their ecosystem. Once set up, Rosettic's agents monitor backend services, and the data are mapped to cost data via billing APIs. The data are then processed by Rosettic's proprietary algorithms, providing customers with granular cloud cost data.

Why now is the perfect time for Rosettic?

The current market conditions and the need for increased profitability in the tech industry make it the perfect time for Rosettic to launch its product. As the cost of capital has increased and fundraising has become less certain, profitability is the only way to guarantee business survival. Business and engineering leaders are placing newfound importance on margin health.

Additionally, monitoring technologies like eBPF and OpenTelemetry have come a long way in the past few years, allowing seamless monitoring of different technology stacks and removing friction where engineering teams would have otherwise needed to make significant investments in setup and maintenance. Application performance monitoring companies like Datadog have proven that monitoring dozens of services is technically feasible and can be profitable even at scale.

With these supply and demand factors in mind, Rosettic's founders saw an opportunity to provide a unique solution to a pressing problem in the tech industry. By providing granular cloud cost data, Rosettic helps companies optimize their pricing, evaluate the profitability of each product, and make strategic decisions about resource allocation and cloud architecture.

Conclusion

Rosettic's solution addresses a critical need in the tech industry by providing granular cloud cost data that enables companies to optimize their pricing, evaluate the profitability of each product, and make strategic decisions about resource allocation and cloud architecture. By monitoring backend services with lightweight agents and attributing activity to specific features and customers, Rosettic provides a complete picture of who and what are driving cloud costs over time.

With an easy setup process and the ability to work with multiple cloud services, Rosettic's solution is poised to make a significant impact in the tech industry. Founded by two Stanford University graduates with experience in strategy, sales, and engineering, Rosettic is well-positioned to help companies increase their profitability and ensure their long-term success.