Cloudability Manages all Your Cloud Costs in One Place

With almost all service providers using the public beta of a cost-tracking service, Cloudability has entered into the scene to provide users the access they need to view their own billing and usage history. Cloudability will make use of APIs to provide the access to information from cloud providers such as Salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google, Rackspace and Heroku.

Cloudability aims to help both businesses and users to keep track and monitor their usage history. This is the usual problem encountered in using multiple cloud services and to help ease out this loophole Cloudability will provide access to communication between various interfaces.

An example of its use is when individual users make a purchase or subscribe to a service application using their credit card; this gives them less control in monitoring usage. What Cloudability does is to give businesses and users control over who’s using what type of services and leverage in making better deals when the demand is high. Because of this service feature and capability, Cloudability was once referred to as “the Mint.com for companies.”

This week, Cloudability will allow beta customers to use JSON or XML API to access their personal information, usage history and cloud billing statement. From the data provided by Cloudability users can easily channel and create it into an Excel spreadsheet for ease of use.

Cloudability will have a user-friendly feature that will simply allow an easy click-through menu where users can simply enter the type of service and the cloud provider they are subscribed to. J. R. Storment, chief customer officer of the company said, “Once they hit save, we aggregate all that data in one place and they can then drill down on detailed reports, set up alerts if spending goes over X amount, and daily emails that tells them where they are.”

Storment added, “We think customers would like to start tracking spending from Rackspace, Google Apps, even down to the GoDaddy level.” The service, which still runs in beta, has already tracked more than $7 million of cloud-based service application spending from 81 cloud providers. Cloudability has also helped users to save at least an average of $2,000 per month. Matt Ellis, Cloudability CEO stated that the service is free for up to $100,000 in annual spending.

Cloudability has designed a unique technique in recruiting users to use this service; Ellis said “If you refer friends to the service, it’s free and if you refer a paying customer, we’ll ship you free beer.”