The Challenge: Cost Transparency at Scale
Island lacked visibility into true cost per customer and cost per feature. This created major blind spots:
- No clear understanding of customer–level margins
- No insight into expensive features or unexpected usage patterns
- Limited ability to support pricing, growth modeling, or GTM decisions
While billing data was available, Island couldn’t see what was actually driving costs at the application layer.
Island runs a sophisticated AWS environment with heavy use of shared resources, including EKS, RDS, DynamoDB, and significant data transfer such as AZ–to–AZ traffic. Accurately allocating these shared costs in a multi–tenant environment was effectively impossible with traditional tools. Island tried native cloud tools and third–party platforms. These tools made it easy to view bills and charts, but failed to answer the core questions:
- What does each customer really cost?
- Which features are expensive to run?
- Where is high–cost usage coming from?
Tagging wasn’t a solution. It requires heavy setup, constant maintenance, and can’t reliably capture customer–level consumption in a multi–tenant architecture.
Solution Discovery: FinOps Without Tagging
When Island encountered Attribute’s “FinOps without Tagging” approach, it immediately resonated.
Attribute required no tagging, no custom logs, and no manual instrumentation. Automated discovery began scanning Island’s runtime consumption from day one, delivering useful insights within days. The evaluation process was fast and truly plug–and–play, enabling Island to tie cloud spend directly to business outcomes.
- With Attribute, Island gained:
- Accurate cost per customer
- Cost per feature visibility
- Reliable allocation of shared infrastructure and data transfer
- A single source of truth for customer–level cloud economics
Attribute delivered granular, trusted cost metering without adding operational overhead, revealing exactly where to focus and where savings opportunities existed.
Results:
True Cost–Per–Customer Visibility
Island can now see what each customer actually costs, even in a complex multi–tenant environment.
Better Pricing and Margin Decisions
Feature–level and customer–level insights support smarter pricing and more accurate growth modeling.
No Tagging, No Maintenance Overhead
Cost transparency without the operational burden of tagging or manual cost modeling.
Stronger Cross–Team Alignment
Engineering, product, and GTM teams operate from a shared, trusted cost source.