About Alchemy
Alchemy is a leading blockchain platform that powers over 30 blockchain networks and offers innovative solutions for businesses and developers in the decentralized space. As its cloud infrastructure grew, Alchemy needed to keep cloud costs in check while giving its engineers the resources they needed to build and scale quickly.
“Finout helped us turn our cloud spending into a strategic advantage. The visibility we now have makes cost-cutting decisions so much easier.”
Stas Karchevskiy | Finance Operations
The Challenge
As a fast-growing blockchain company, Alchemy faced challenges in managing complex cloud costs while balancing engineering needs. With limited visibility into how costs were allocated across teams and projects, aligning cloud spending with business objectives proved difficult. Tying cloud expenses directly to product development was a guessing game, making accurate budgeting a challenge.
Alchemy also struggled with its growing AWS bill, lacking clarity on spending patterns and facing difficulties in forecasting future costs. The company’s recent acquisitions of two crypto businesses added further complexity, especially as one of the acquired companies relied heavily on bare metal servers, making infrastructure integration across the organization more challenging. To address this, Alchemy needed to establish custom cost centers to consolidate cloud spending into a single source of truth. Without a dedicated FinOps team, a finance associate was responsible for managing these costs, resulting in substantial manual effort and inefficiency.
“Before Finout, I’d spend too much time manually figuring out where our money was going, rather than focusing on the big picture. From 10 hours weekly to a glance in the dashboard"
Stas Karchevskiy | Finance Operations
Why Finout
Alchemy knew they needed more than just a cloud cost management tool—they needed a solution that could integrate with engineering workflows and scale with them. After reviewing several options, they chose Finout for four key reasons:
- Real-Time Cost Tracking - Finout’s Virtual Tagging and MegaBill features allowed Alchemy to instantly track costs by cost center and environment, eliminating the guesswork.
- Empowering Engineers - Engineers could now see the financial impact of their work in real-time, which made them more proactive about optimizing resources.
- Clear, Actionable Insights - Finout’s dashboards made cloud spending easy to understand, with detailed insights that both engineering and finance teams could act on.
- Smart Alerts for Quick Action - The solution’s Anomaly Detection feature helped the team identify cost spikes fast, preventing surprises in the cloud bill.
“Seeing costs tied directly to engineering efforts gave everyone—both on the dev side and the finance side—a clear view of how to optimize."
Stas Karchevskiy | Finance Operations
The Result
Cost Allocation
Thanks to Finout’s Virtual Tags, Alchemy now tracks 98% of its cloud costs by cost center and environment. This gives teams the clarity they need and means that everything—from discounts to savings plans to EDP’s —is accounted for automatically.
“Finout made cost allocation so much easier. I can trust the numbers now, and everyone can get access to the data they need without any bottlenecking"
Stas Karchevskiy | Finance Operations
Cost Savings
Alchemy has realized substantial cost savings by reducing their ECS costs by 97.5% and moving services out of AWS due to cost spikes. The team also identified and shut down unused services that were still running. Finout’s clear data helps teams make better decisions to avoid overspending before it happens.
Efficiency Boost
Weekly reports that once took hours can now be done in minutes. This saves time and allows the finance team to focus on higher-level tasks, while engineering teams get to work on what they do best.
“We were spending way too much time tracking costs. Now, we’ve cut that down to almost nothing, which is a huge win for our teams. Our teams are much more efficient and have saved anywhere from 10-15 hours a week with autogenerated reports”
Stas Karchevskiy | Finance Operations
Quick Actions on Cost Inefficiencies
Finout’s real-time anomaly detection allowed the team to address cost issues quickly. For example, an unused service still running showed up on the radar immediately, and the team could quickly turn it off within 3 to 4 minutes, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"The anomaly alerts feature has helped us prevent erroneous costs within a week of deploying them, by helping us to quickly identify and address issues."
Stas Karchevskiy | Finance Operations
Looking Ahead
Alchemy is excited to continue using Finout to fine-tune its cloud cost strategy. The ability to forecast and track spending with even greater accuracy is helping the team stay on top of cloud growth without the overhead. With Finout’s support and customization options, Alchemy feels confident that it’ll keep optimizing its cloud infrastructure as it scales.
“Finout doesn’t just give us a platform—it’s a true partner that listens and adapts to our needs. We’re already thinking about how we can use their features to improve even more.”
Stas Karchevskiy | Finance Operations
