Designing AWS Cloud-Cost Monitoring From Scratch

Designing AWS Cloud-Cost Monitoring From Scratch

Helping procurement, cloud, and finance teams move from fragmented billing data to shared cost visibility and actionable decisions.

ROLE AND CONTEXT UX Designer | Internal AWS FinOps product | Tredence

Cloudi was a highly technical AWS cloud-cost monitoring product designed from scratch and later iterated. It was created for internal procurement, cloud, and finance teams and reached production.

THE PROBLEM Different teams needed different views of the same AWS spend. Finance needed budget confidence, cloud teams needed resource-level detail, and procurement needed information that could support commercial and planning decisions. Raw billing data alone did not give them a shared way to detect, explain, and act on cost risk.

DESIGN DIRECTION I translated technical billing information into a progressive path from overview to action:

Understand total spend and movement over time.

Filter by account, team, service, or resource.

Drill into the technical source of unusual cost.

Review optimisation opportunities with relevant context.

Track alerts and reporting information without losing the original spend context.

KEY DECISIONS • Use progressive disclosure so financial users could begin with trends while technical users retained access to detail. • Keep filters and drill-down context persistent across the journey. • Connect recommendations to the affected resource rather than presenting generic savings advice. • Make alerts, budgets, ownership, and reporting part of one operating view. • Iterate the product as teams learned which signals were useful in day-to-day decisions.

OUTCOME AND EVIDENCE NOTE Cloudi shipped and contributed to cost-saving decisions. Savings are kept qualitative because a verified numerical method and attribution are not currently available.

Full case study: https://savitasingh.vercel.app/case-studies/tredence-cloud