Comparison
CloudZero alternative for smaller AWS accounts
CloudZero solves a sophisticated problem: allocating cloud spend to units that matter — cost per customer, per feature, per product line — with an enterprise platform priced accordingly (as of mid-2026). It’s the right ambition for engineering-led organisations at scale. But unit economics presumes the spend itself is broadly sane. If a third of your bill is idle compute and forgotten storage, allocation isn’t the first problem — the waste is.
Before allocating the spend, see how much of it shouldn’t exist: the free scan takes 20 minutes.
Run the free scanDifferent problems, different tools
- →Allocate vs. eliminate. CloudZero tells you which product line spends what. An audit tells you which resources are wasting money regardless of whose they are. At SME scale, elimination almost always pays better than allocation — there’s simply more waste than misattribution.
- →Platform adoption vs. one engagement. Unit-economics platforms need integration, tagging discipline and ongoing team engagement to deliver value. The audit needs a read-only role and 20 minutes, and delivers a ranked fix list either way.
- →Enterprise pricing vs. £499. Enterprise platform subscriptions make sense against enterprise bills. Against a £5k/month AWS account, £499 once — guaranteed to find 20%+ or free — is a different order of decision.
- →The sequence that works. Clean first, allocate later. Unit economics on a wasteful account bakes the waste into every per-customer number. If CloudZero is in your future, arriving with a clean account makes its numbers mean something.
Put numbers on it
Frequently asked questions
We want cost-per-customer numbers. Can the audit give us that?
No — that genuinely is platform territory, and CloudZero-class tools do it well. The audit gives you the prerequisite: an account where spend maps to live, right-sized resources. Allocation on top of waste produces confident-looking numbers that are wrong.
At what size does a unit-economics platform start making sense?
A workable heuristic: when the bill is large enough that a percentage-point of misallocation exceeds the platform cost, and when engineering leadership will actually act on per-feature numbers. Below that — most companies under £30k/month — the same money spent eliminating waste returns more.
£499 fixed. Free scan first. 20%+ found or it’s free.
The scan is read-only — a role you create and delete, no keys shared — and shows your estimated monthly saving before anyone talks about money.