Today marks a significant milestone in cloud financial management. We're thrilled to announce the general availability of OPTIMAZE, the first AI-native Cloud Economics Platform designed to solve Australia's $3 billion cloud waste crisis and help enterprises worldwide transform how they understand cloud spending.

"Why Is My Cloud Bill So High?"

This question echoes across boardrooms and engineering teams at businesses relying on cloud services everywhere. Traditionally the focus has been on absolute numbers and resource optimization, for example: migrate from M5 to M8 instances, identify unused resources, right-size your databases. While manageable and valuable for smaller environments, this approach becomes increasingly noisy at scale and fails to address a fundamental issue: poor data quality from stale tags, shared services, and fragmented environments.

The result? According to Gartner, organizations waste 30% of their cloud expenditure. Even more concerning, studies show that under 20% of cloud users have their environments tagged above 80%. Without accurate cost attribution, teams can't answer basic questions about which products, teams, or business units are driving costs, or generating returns.

A Different Approach: Cloud Economics

OPTIMAZE takes a fundamentally different approach to reducing cloud waste. Rather than treating cloud management as a resource optimization problem, we treat it as a financial performance problem. This distinction matters exponentially as organizations scale.

What Is A Cloud Economics Platform?

A Cloud Economics Platform (CEP) provides financial clarity from a business perspective and is centred on three core pillars:

1. Financial and business performance indicators for your technology environment through Unit Economics

2. Enhanced attribution of cost data, enriched with relevant business markers and context

3. Decentralized, consumable financial intelligence accessible to every stakeholder: finance, product, engineering, and leadership

Think of it like stock market ratios your favourite broker website provides for your stocks. Whether you're analyzing a Fortune 500 company or a small business, ratios like P/E, profit margins, and ROI provide meaningful insight regardless of absolute scale. The same principle applies to cloud Unit Economics. It provides a benchmark and an ability to start comparing the financial performance of different parts of the business historically and in real-time. 

Agentic Cost Attribution: 20-50% Uplift with One Click

The prerequisite for financial clarity for cloud, is that the data is accurate. You need accurate cost attribution. This is where traditional approaches break down spectacularly.

For large cloud users, improving tagging accuracy is a full-time job. OPTIMAZE estimates that for every $5M in annual cloud spend, organizations dedicate approximately $200K annually to FinOps-related tasks year after year. Teams manually update tags, build automation pipelines, implement CI/CD tagging workflows, and still struggle to maintain accurate cost attribution above 80%.

It's also critical to understand that tagging and cost attribution are not the same thing. You can achieve close to a 100% tag coverage by applying generic tags across your environment (many auto-tagging solutions do exactly this), but this simply converts untagged resources into shared costs rather than accurately attributing them to specific teams, products, or business units.

How OPTIMAZE Changes the Game

OPTIMAZE's Cloud Economics Platform leverages agentic AI to uplift cost attribution in ways that weren't previously possible:

• Instant attribution uplift: Most customers achieve 20-50% improvement in cost attribution immediately upon onboarding

• Massive time savings: Depending on environment size, this saves thousands of hours on tagging upkeep annually

• Intelligent hygiene: The platform deduplicates tags, fixes erroneous entries, and maintains consistency

• Smart groupings: Where tags don't exist or shared services complicate attribution, OPTIMAZE suggests logical groupings based on resource relationships and usage patterns

• Agile onboarding: New acquisitions integrate into your attribution framework semi-automatically

• User control: Teams remain in full control, with the ability to review, approve and manually adjust any changes

The result? Up to 90% reduction in cloud-native tagging effort while achieving significantly better attribution accuracy.

Visualize, Understand, Act

Better data is only valuable if it's accessible. Most organizations rely on expensive Business Intelligence tools to build custom dashboards for cost visualization, a time-consuming process that requires specialized skills and ongoing maintenance.

OPTIMAZE includes native Attribution Graphing capabilities out of the box. Users select their dimension, Product, Team, Cost Center, or a custom grouping, and costs are represented visually in an intuitive, explorable format. Click into any group to access an AI-enabled dashboard showing raw data, historical benchmarks for your unit economics, and Atlas-powered trend analyses.

No BI tool required. No dashboard development. Just immediate, actionable visibility showing where money flows across your technology estate.

Unit Economics: From Firefighting to Strategic Operations

The most transformative aspect of a Cloud Economics Platform is how it changes organizational behavior around cloud spending.

The Centralized FinOps Bottleneck

Many large cloud customers started with centralized FinOps teams. This made sense initially, concentrate expertise, build shared tooling, drive optimization initiatives. But centralized approaches don't scale. As environments grow, the noise-to-action ratio deteriorates. Priorities shift from optimization to financial governance, reporting and firefighting. The central team becomes a bottleneck, and efficiency initiatives stall.

Enabling Decentralized Financial Accountability

OPTIMAZE enables organizations to decentralize financial intelligence while maintaining consistency. The platform includes a comprehensive set of Unit Economics metrics and governance capabilities that teams can leverage to benchmark their performance. Teams can also build their own. For example:

• Cost per user/transaction/request: Understand efficiency at the business outcome level

• Cost per team/product/feature: Enable clear accountability and comparison

• Historical trends and benchmarks: Track improvement over time and against peer performance

• Real-time KPI tracking: Set targets and monitor progress continuously

When teams have clear, relevant financial metrics tied to their work, cloud efficiency becomes part of standard operating procedures rather than an ad-hoc firefighting exercise. Supported by Atlas artificial intelligence, engineering managers can easily identify high-performing teams, spot anomalies early, and make informed decisions about technology investments.

Anyone within an organization  interested in finding out more about cloud costs, can also self service questions through Atlas’ conversational AI functionality. Aimed at alleviating 80% of the common questions FinOps teams get, it helps finance, product and leadership get answers immediately, and free up FinOps teams for more strategic tasks.   

This approach treats cloud spending with the financial maturity that one of the largest line items on the balance sheet deserves.

One Platform for Your Entire Technology Stack

At launch, OPTIMAZE supports AWS, with additional technology providers coming soon. The platform serves as the central financial performance hub for all technology spending, creating a fully integrated cost stack that connects back-office cost data to front-office financial performance criteria.

Benefits include:

• Single attribution standard across all technologies, accounts and businesses

• Custom and standard KPIs across teams, products, and cost centers

• Real-time cost of ownership without manual reconciliation

• No more toggling between multiple native cloud consoles and tools

• Keep cost structures synchronized with your evolving business

• Self-service enablement of financial inspection

Pricing That Aligns to Outcomes

Resource based FinOps tools charge based on your cloud spend. The more you spend, the more they cost. This creates an incentive misalignment. OPTIMAZE pricing works differently.

Attribution Uplift Billing

The clearest ROI from OPTIMAZE comes from improved cost attribution, which directly saves time and effort. Therefore, we bill based on achieved Attribution Uplift:

• Baseline established at engagement start based on your existing environment

• Quarterly re-assessment to capture ongoing value

• Pricing scales favorably at attribution thresholds

• If you don't achieve uplift, you don't get billed

Atlas AI Token Consumption

The second dimension is Atlas AI tokens, consumed based on:

• Number of queries

• Complexity of each query

Tokens can be pre-purchased for budget predictability or paid as you go for flexibility, supporting different procurement and forecasting needs.

Reach out to OPTIMAZE and get a pricing example specific to your business. 

Getting Started

OPTIMAZE is available today. You can sign up through optimazehq.com

The platform includes:

• Agentic Cost Attribution

• Unit Economics (standard metrics and bring-your-own)

• Spend visualization and Attribution Graphing

• Atlas AI conversational financial management (beta)

Who Should Consider OPTIMAZE?

The Cloud Economics Platform is especially valuable for:

• Consumers of cloud services with over $1M+ annual spend

• Organizations with rapidly growing or complex environments

• Businesses undergoing digital transformation or M&A activity

• Companies seeking to decentralize and scale FinOps practices

• Teams struggling with tagging accuracy below 80% and shared services

• Organizations where cloud spend is a top-three operating expense

What's Next

Over the coming months, we'll be expanding technology provider support, enhancing Atlas AI capabilities, and introducing new unit economics templates for specific industries and use cases. We will also launch our AWS Marketplace listing shortly.

Especially in the age of AI experimentation, we believe it's critical for almost every large cloud consumer to uplift their cloud financial maturity. Not just through FinOps teams and ad hoc reporting, but in real-time, accessible to everyone who needs it, with the context and intelligence to drive better decisions. Only then will we be able to drive down cloud waste. 

Ready to transform your cloud financial management? Register on optimazehq.com to get started.

About OPTIMAZE

OPTIMAZE is a Sydney-based startup that has raised $3M in pre-seed funding to build the first AI-native Cloud Economics Platform. Founded to address Australia's $3 billion cloud waste crisis, OPTIMAZE helps enterprises achieve real-time cloud cost attribution, unit economics, and AI powered financial management. Learn more at optimazehq.com.