PropertyGuru – Driving Engineering Ownership and Efficiency at Scale

Before Attribute, PropertyGuru’s FinOps practice was mostly reactive. Cost visibility was fragmented across multiple AWS organizations and GCP accounts, making it difficult to see a consolidated picture of spend. This lack of transparency made budgeting difficult and hindered the ability to set baselines for individual teams.

Costs often spiked unexpectedly, particularly around data transfer between availability zones. Explaining these behaviors required hours of digging through flow logs, a reactive fire drill repeated every month. Meanwhile, underutilized infrastructure and zombie resources left behind from deprecated services continued to consume the budget, but only became visible when the invoice arrived.

“We needed real-time data and a way to easily attribute costs for shared services, which were our biggest and most complex black box,” the team shared.

The net result was that FinOps acted as a monthly post-mortem exercise rather than a proactive capability that could guide smarter engineering and product decisions.

PropertyGuru turned to Attribute to break this cycle. What stood out immediately was the platform’s unique promise of “FinOps without tagging.” Unlike traditional approaches that rely heavily on tagging compliance, Attribute delivered value from day one by automatically mapping costs, including those from complex shared services, back to the teams consuming them.

“We immediately saw clear cost attribution for our complex shared services-the very thing we struggled with most. That initial ‘aha!’ moment showed us the value in days, not months.”

Smooth Evaluation and Deployment

The evaluation process was fast and lightweight, requiring no lengthy setup or tagging cleanups. Deployment proved equally straightforward. With clear documentation and Attribute’s lightweight sensors rolled out across EKS clusters and VMs, the engineering team quickly had the system up and running.

Within just two weeks, PropertyGuru was surfacing actionable insights that had previously taken weeks or months to uncover. The first wins included identifying opportunities to optimize data transfer patterns and improve compute utilization, two of the company’s biggest sources of inefficiency.

“Within just a couple of weeks, we had actionable insights that immediately highlighted opportunities to optimize data transfer and improve compute utilization.”

Why Attribute Worked

• Tag-free cost attribution delivered instant value
• Shared costs decoded without manual analysis
• Fast deployment with minimal engineering overhead
• Time-to-value measured in days, not quarters

This combination of technical depth, ease of adoption, and immediate ROI made Attribute the clear choice to anchor PropertyGuru’s FinOps strategy moving forward.

Business Results

Attribute fundamentally changed the way PropertyGuru approaches cloud cost management. Instead of chasing anomalies after the bill arrived, teams now use real-time insights to design more efficiently from the start. The platform created a single source of truth across engineering, finance, and product, aligning cost accountability with business priorities.

Efficiency Gains

One of the most tangible outcomes was the reduction in investigation time. Tasks that once took hours of combing through AWS logs now take just minutes in Attribute. Engineers can create team-specific cost views on demand, eliminating repetitive manual reporting and enabling true self-service FinOps.

“What used to take hours of digging through AWS logs to decode a shared service bill now takes minutes in Attribute. Creating team-specific views has eliminated repetitive manual work and enabled true self-service for our engineers.”

Cultural Shift

Perhaps the biggest impact was cultural. For the first time, engineering teams could see exactly how their code and architectural choices affected cloud spend. This transparency fostered a “you build it, you own it” ethos, shifting accountability away from finance and embedding it directly into engineering workflows.

“This visibility enabled us to truly adopt a ‘you build it, you own it, you pay for it’ culture, turning cost management from a central finance problem into a shared engineering responsibility.”

Solving Shared Costs

Attribute also cracked one of PropertyGuru’s toughest challenges: shared services attribution. Instead of treating shared resources as an opaque black box, the platform intelligently maps costs from databases, clusters, and other common services back to the microservices that consume them. This breakthrough unlocked insights that had previously been impossible, giving teams actionable data to guide architectural and business decisions.

Building on this success, PropertyGuru plans to expand Attribute’s use beyond engineering. Finance and product leaders will soon be able to directly answer questions like “What’s the true cost of this feature?” – linking cloud spend with business context to guide strategy.

The partnership itself has also been a differentiator.

“The partnership has been fantastic. The Attribute team is more than just a vendor; they are incredibly responsive, listen to our feedback, and actively incorporate it into their roadmap, which makes us feel like a true partner in their product’s evolution.”