Unit Economics

The idea

Total spend is a bad measure of whether cloud cost is under control. A bill that grows 20% while the business grows 40% is a success story that looks like a problem.

Unit economics fixes that by dividing cost by something the business cares about:

Cost per customer
Cost per active user
Cost per 1k requests

Cost per customer falling while total spend rises is the shape of a healthy, growing business. No other screen in CloudMonitor can show you that.

Why it isn’t finished

The cost half is straightforward — CloudMonitor already knows what you spent over any period, in either cost basis.

The other half is the problem. CloudMonitor has no way to learn how many customers you have, how many people used your product, or how many requests you served. Those numbers live in your CRM and your own telemetry, and the screen says so where each one would go:

Needs an external CRM feed

Needs a product-telemetry feed

Inventing a denominator would produce a confident, precise, meaningless number — which is worse than no number at all. So the screen waits.

What to expect when it lands

The rates will be tenant-wide. Scoping the cost half to one provider or cost group while the denominator stays whole-organisation would skew every figure — dividing one team’s spend by all your customers is not a meaningful rate. So the provider, cost group and virtual tag filters won’t apply here, and CloudMonitor will grey them out with that reason rather than letting you produce a wrong number quietly.

Period and cost basis will apply normally.

In the meantime

The Explorer can already show cost as a rate against the denominators it does have. It’s not the same thing, but it’s the nearest available.

If unit economics matters to you, tell us which denominators you’d want and where they live — that’s the part of this that’s genuinely blocked on integration work rather than on building the screen.