Boston, MA, USA
2016
  |  By Keith MacKenzie
This edition of the Pulse is shifting lanes. We’re calling it the AI Economics Pulse now, because the question on every finance leader’s mind is whether AI spend and the returns on it can be made to pair at all. That question came to a head over the last few weeks. The bills came due, and they came due in public. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months and capped employee spending on Claude Code and Cursor at $1,500 a month.
  |  By Scott Castle
Your engineers run Claude Code. Your designers are in Cowork. Half the company has Claude open in a browser tab, and a few are on Cursor. It’s on their laptops, each person authenticated a different way, and none of it touches your gateway. The only record you get is one lump-sum bill at the end of the month. Now you can capture it where it happens – on the laptop.
  |  By Lyne Carolyne
Something unusual happened in the first half of 2026: the most productive AI coding tool on the market became the most financially dangerous. And the companies that discovered this the hard way read like a Fortune 50 roll call.
  |  By Kaitlin Woo
One dimension gives you a list. Two gives you a story. Now you can slice by two dimensions simultaneously, right in CloudZero Explorer.
  |  By Scott Castle
You’re funding AI across four billing relationships – Anthropic direct, OpenAI, Claude through Bedrock, Claude through Vertex – and the spend climbs every month. When your CEO asks what it’s producing, you have a number and no answer. Not which product it built, which customer it served, or which bet it’s paying off. And you’re being asked to approve more of it.
  |  By Kaitlin Woo
Org admins can now see each user’s last login directly in Settings > Users, making it easy to spot inactive accounts, manage licenses, and run security reviews without opening a support ticket.
  |  By Kaitlin Woo
CostFormation is how your organization models cost allocation. As more teams adopt it, protecting that logic matters. RBAC for CostFormation Namespaces lets you scope access at the namespace level, so the right people can view and edit Dimensions, and everyone else can’t.
  |  By Thomas Evans
CloudZero originated as a way to make sense of your cloud costs. Costs spread across bills with billions of line items belonging to resources that might or might not have been tagged (or taggable), spun up by engineers working across teams, on different microservices, features, and products, that served a wide range of customers. Kubernetes. Multi-cloud. Check, check, check.
  |  By Lyne Carolyne
Every quarter, the same scene plays out in boardrooms across the Fortune 500. The CEO asks: “What is the return on everything the company is spending on AI?” The CTO talks about productivity gains and developer velocity. The CFO points at a cloud bill that doubled but cannot isolate which line items are AI. The board nods politely and tables the discussion until next quarter, when the same question will produce the same non-answer. (If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. Keep reading.)
  |  By Lyne Carolyne
Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 on May 28, 2026, exactly 41 days after Opus 4.7. The SERP was empty for two days after launch. Not because nobody cared. Because engineering managers and finance teams were doing the math on whether the bill changes.
  |  By CloudZero
CloudZero unveils our new logo and brand.

With CloudZero you get insights about your applications and systems, helping you manage operations at a scale that you’ve never had before. Our platform provides you with insights about every piece of your system, including the real cost of resources, resource utilization, reserved capacity and cost center efficiency.

With the accurate and trusted data provided by CloudZero you can minimize or eliminate under utilized resources, visualize costs for easy comprehension and oversee the entire software lifecycle. Nothing is out of view when using CloudZero’s Observability platform. From regional views to individual resources, you have insights at every level to help you keep your systems running smoothly.

How do we do it?

  • Collect and Normalize: CloudZero’s platform starts by collecting the data from your CloudWatch, CloudTrail, VPC Flowlogs, Lambda Data Events and Billing Data from every AWS account you connect. This part of the platform is isolated in its own account for security and has read-only access to the accounts you connect.
  • Populate the Stream: All of the data collected is normalized and the events, resources, statistics and billing data are organized into data streams which allow our platform to perform real-time analytics on all the data collected.
  • Find Meaning: Our algorithms take in the normalized data and perform complex analytics sifting through all the data to filter noise and enhance signal. We use Machine Learning on a large scale to learn what is valuable to surface.
  • Visualize Everything: The application provides opinionated visualizations of the insights determined by the platform’s AI. From regional system maps to single resources to cost of service broken down by team, CloudZero’s platform provides true observability to everyone in your organization.

Observability for Everyone. Add cost as a first-class metric and understand the financial effect of operational decisions.