Architecture Review: Cloudchipr

Cloudchipr claims to be Cloud costs observability, management and automation platform. Let’s look under the hood.

🛠️ The Tech Stack

Cloudchipr operates as a specialized FinOps control plane rather than a simple visualization tool. Its architecture distinguishes itself by moving beyond read-only reporting into active resource management.

• Core Engine: The backend leverages Go, evidenced by their open-source contributions (forking opencost) and the high-concurrency requirements of processing billing millions of line items.
• Data Ingestion: It integrates directly with cloud provider billing APIs (AWS Cost & Usage Reports, GCP Billing Export, Azure Cost Management). Unlike shallow wrappers, it normalizes this data into a unified schema, allowing cross-cloud queries.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): The platform heavily utilizes Terraform and Helm for onboarding. It uses an agentless model for standard cloud resources (via IAM roles) but employs an agent-based approach (using eBPF/OpenCost) for granular Kubernetes visibility.
• AI Layer: The “Ask AI” feature suggests a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) implementation, likely wrapping OpenAI’s API to translate natural language queries (“Why did my S3 bill spike?”) into SQL-like queries against their normalized cost database.
• Automation: This is the differentiator. It doesn’t just alert; it executes. The system includes a workflow engine capable of triggering API calls to stop/terminate resources based on defined policies (e.g., TTLs on sandbox environments).

💰 Pricing Model

Cloudchipr follows a Paid SaaS model with a free trial, positioning itself for teams rather than individual hobbyists.

• Free Trial: 14-day full access trial.
• Basic Tier ($49/mo): Covers up to $5k/mo in cloud spend. Includes basic reporting and resource management.
• Advanced Tier ($189/mo): Up to $25k/mo spend. Adds automation features (auto-cleanup) and more integrations.
• Pro Tier ($445/mo): Up to $100k/mo spend. Includes anomaly detection and AI features.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing for >$100k spend.

Note: Unlike some competitors that offer a “Free Forever” tier for very low cloud spend (<$500), Cloudchipr effectively sets a floor price, making it less attractive for solo developers but highly efficient for funded startups.

⚖️ Architect’s Verdict

Production Ready (with caveats for small teams).

Cloudchipr is Deep Tech disguised as a dashboard. While 80% of the market offers “Cost Visualization” (a Wrapper around AWS Cost Explorer), Cloudchipr solves the “Action Gap.” Most tools tell you that you are wasting money; Cloudchipr actually logs in and deletes the unused resources for you.

Developer Use Case: The “Killer Feature” for developers is the Automated Sandbox Cleanup. Instead of nagging the team to turn off dev instances, you can configure a Cloudchipr workflow: “If EC2 instance has tag env=sandbox and CPU < 5% for 4 hours, STOP instance.” This moves cost management from a finance spreadsheet problem to a CI/CD automation solution.

Pros:

• Actionable automation (Write access), not just reporting (Read access).
• Granular Kubernetes cost allocation (often a black box in AWS/GCP native tools).
• AI query interface lowers the barrier for non-DevOps team members.

Cons:

• No “Hobbyist” free tier makes it hard to adopt for side projects.
• Granting “Write/Delete” permissions to a third-party SaaS requires a high trust threshold for security teams.