Cost Engineering Embedded Where Engineers Work

Spotify runs its cloud and data infrastructure at a scale that has to support more than 299 million listeners around the clock. That scale comes with a familiar tension: the company’s autonomous engineering squads are expected to move fast, but as a public company, it also has to keep an eye on the bottom line. The cost engineering team’s answer is not top-down budget enforcement but a tool that makes cost data visible and actionable inside the developer workflow.

The result is Cost Insights, an open source plugin for Backstage.io. Rather than issuing directives to reduce spend, Spotify uses the tool to expose cloud costs in terms engineers understand and to highlight optimization opportunities where cost, performance, and reliability improvements overlap.

Figure above for illustrative purposes only.

Putting Cloud Cost in Business Context

Existing cloud cost management tools answer “how much are we spending?” but not “is that the right amount?” At Spotify, a figure like $10,000 is meaningless without context around business growth. The goal for Cost Insights is to pair cost data with business metrics so engineers, engineering managers, and product managers can make informed trade-offs between growth initiatives and cost optimizations.

The design principle behind the tool is that cost visibility belongs where engineers already work. Placing the cost interface alongside other frequently used products and services lowers friction and encourages action. Teams that are spending heavily on cloud keep that freedom when the spend supports growth; the tool exists to help decide when an optimization is more valuable than continued investment.

With Cost Insights, engineering teams can:

  • See their cloud spend and how it relates to their business unit’s growth.
  • Prioritize cost optimizations against business growth goals.
  • Get clear, concrete recommendations for reducing or optimizing spend.

Core Features in the Open Source Release

The initial open source version of the Cost Insights plugin ships with three features designed to provide a solid foundation and room to grow.

  • Cost vs. business graph: Users can track how their team or a specific GCP project is trending relative to the company’s overall business growth.
  • Detailed product panels: Panels for six cloud products break down costs to the resource level and compare product growth over time. They are currently oriented toward GCP but can be configured for other cloud providers.
  • Project alerting: Teams get notified when project costs cross a chosen threshold and can then drill into resource-level changes.

Guarding Against Over-Optimization

A cost tool in a growth-focused, autonomous culture cuts both ways. Since Cost Insights is accessible to any Spotify employee, the product team had to be explicit about when a cost increase warrants investigation. Thresholds capture both absolute spend and growth trends; the tool only nudges teams that are growing faster than the business itself. This prevents the tool from becoming an obstacle for teams whose higher spend is tied to strategic growth.

What’s Next for Cost Insights

With Cost Insights available in open source through Backstage, teams can already judge for themselves whether the time spent on an optimization is worth the savings. The roadmap now points to open sourcing the backend, adding SKU-level cost breakdowns for finer granularity, and delivering alert dismissals that reflect user feedback.