Cloud Cost Management for SaaS Companies

Cloud cost creep doesn’t happen overnight. It happens quietly under the radar one resource at a time. New SaaS startups work on small scales in the interim: a few Azure Functions, App Service plans, maybe SQL or Cosmos DB for persistence. It’s lean, serverless, and the monthly invoice stays super low.

But that only lasts until product-market fit. Now, more tenants on board means scaling out regions for redundancy, support resources for monitoring and alerts, different staging environments for DR testing, backup resources across many services for RPO, security layers for RTOs. All of these lead to more Azure resources super quickly—and the cloud bill follows suit.

For most SaaS teams, budget oversight is a reactive occurrence rather than proactive cloud cost optimization technique. That’s an issue when Azure spend starts skyrocketing.

When saas spending goes awry

SaaS products, predominately on Azure, tend to scale quickly. The more customers you have, the more engagement occurs within your applications, and the harder it is to attribute cloud spend to operational efforts.

Some complications that occur are:

• Multitenant resources without visibility into tenant spend – If you create multitenant architecture without the ability to report on spend per tenant, it’s difficult to understand how much spend each customer is using.
• Incrementally scaling services – Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Event Hub retention, Function execution time these services scale with usage but often go untracked.
• Event-driven architecture – Serverless and message-based service architectures create inconsistent traffic. One day there’s a huge increase in activity, either through seasonal work or campaign efforts, and then the spend reflects that.
• No correlation with business operations – While Azure’s default invoices can run very high, they’re very detailed and dissociated with what’s going on in reality. For example:
  • Event Hubs: $123
  • Storage: $305
  • Azure Functions: $417  

But these numbers do not indicate what tenant or what functionality attributed to the specific charge.

Read more – Calculating SaaS Customer Cost.

Azure Native Resources: Necessary but not for saas transparency

Azure has native tools necessary to monitor spending effective but not enough for growing SaaS products.

• Azure Cost Management + Budgets: Gives usage reporting and budget controls. Works well for basic alerts, but does not report granularity by app or customer.
• Azure Advisor: Alerts to changing SKUs or deletion of unused items. Good for IaaS; not as beneficial for SaaS with PaaS as the focus.
• Azure Monitor + Logs: Excellent for usage metrics and troubleshooting, however, does not tie into costs upon setup.

But if you’re running a multitenant SaaS product and asking questions like:

• Which tenant is driving up costs?
• What’s the costliest module?
• Where are we spending too much?

Then Azure’s native capabilities will be of no use to you. But Turbo360 will.

How Turbo360 provides SaaS context to Azure Costs

Turbo360 gives engineering and DevOps teams a business context view of cloud activity relative to an Azure-native SaaS product. Where the finance team might own cost metrics, visibility into costs becomes part of the engineering team’s view.

Cost Grouping at the Tenant Level

Where all other resources are grouped by subscription or resource group, Turbo360 gives teams the ability to group their Azure resources by tenant in addition to application or business unit context.

This answers the question:

“How much is Tenant A costing us across all services?”

Not only is the cost shown by service but shown in a way that mirrors how your product is structured.

Tag Governance 

Tagging is one of the simplest ways to correlate ownership with responsibility; however, across multi-tenancy Azure environments, it rarely gets done consistently. Turbo360 offers: – The ability to see resources without tags – A tag can be monitored as one or many Azure resources. You can monitor this tag to control spend and alert you when it goes over budget. You can also trigger assessments based on budget with the tag as a filter and budget-based alerts. – This ensures your tagging policy is compliant and clean without having to audit manually.

Cost Awareness In Your Alerts

Most teams have a separate observability dashboard than a spend dashboard. Turbo360 merges the two. Investigate why Service Bus utilization spikes and know immediately how much it costs and which app or tenant did it. Turn proactive monitoring into cost-dependent monitoring.

Scaling A SaaS on Azure? Include Cost Visibility In Your Stack

If you’re designing your application to support dozens of tenants today and thousands of tenants tomorrow, you need a cost model that supports your architecture. Here’s what we’ve seen work: – Start tagging from day 1, with tenant ID, environment and service. – Limit features per boundary or app layer for costs.

• Review spend weekly as opposed to when finance flags it.
• Anticipating Azure invoices? You should be assessing your Turbo360 dashboards that detail your usage patterns.

Read more – Automated Cloud Cost Optimization.

Conclusion

SaaS companies are designed to grow, but growth does not automatically occur with relative pricing awareness. While native tools provide an opportunity for basic-level reporting, it fails to tell you the why, who, and how of your cloud invoice.

With Turbo360, cost awareness becomes part of your process. You go from guessing to having observability, where every cost increase has a line, every anomaly gets flagged, and every client’s usage footprint is exposed to you.

That’s not only great engineering; it’s great SaaS environmental sustainability.