Work out finops unit economics instantly with clear inputs, formula shown and shareable results.
Absolute cloud spend is a poor signal in a growing business — it should rise. Unit economics is what matters: cost per active user and cloud spend as a share of revenue. A rising bill with a falling cost per user is healthy scaling; a flat bill with a rising cost per user means efficiency is deteriorating even though finance sees no problem.
Unit economics
cost per user = spend / active users; cloud cost ratio = spend / revenue; infrastructure gross margin = (revenue - spend) / revenue
SaaS businesses typically target under 15 to 20 percent of revenue on infrastructure, though it varies enormously by product. The trend matters more than the absolute figure.
Whatever drives cost. Active users work for consumer products; for a data platform it might be gigabytes processed or API calls served.