About ManoMano

ManoMano operates the largest online platform for DIY and home improvement tools. The company began in France and quickly expanded operations to other European countries and the UK. Today the B2B platform hosts almost 5000 sellers offering 16 million products with 50 million visitors to the site per month. With a goal of connecting customers and sellers, the company is dedicated to developing in-house innovative technology to power the platform and provide a fast, efficient and secure experience for customers.

ManoMano’s FinOps Challenge

In order to develop and operate their B2B platform, ManoMano invests on AWS services, but also on other platforms such as Datadog and Snowflake. They wanted to find a way to make it easy for each developer to keep track of their own costs while also understanding the bigger picture. The company had purchased a solution, but it was not meeting their needs. Aside from not being particularly user-friendly, the data was often inaccurate. To make matters worse, the customer service department was not responsive to requests to try to fix the data accuracy issues, leaving ManoMano no choice but to stop using the product. As a result, a senior member of the engineering team was tasked with developing an internal tool that could be used to track cloud usage.

The most important feature that was required was the ability to customize and aggregate costs across multiple tools. This would enable each engineer to view an aggregate of their specific spending on AWS, Datadog, Snowflake and Kubernetes all in one place. Moreover, this had to be done in a user-friendly and intuitive dashboard to make sure that it would be accessible and actually used by every developer and member of the technology team in the company - well over 100 people.

While an internal tool was developed, it was very rough and the engineer who built it did not have the time to troubleshoot and manage the tool while also managing their other daily tasks. The team had to pause and weigh their options: whether to commit the resources to building a robust in-house tool or to purchase a solution. If the decision was to purchase a solution, it would have to be cost-effective and/or provide capabilities that could not be developed effectively in-house.

Why Finout?

After reading an article about Finout, ManoMano’s team were pleasantly surprised to see a tool whose source of data perfectly matched their biggest cost centers (AWS, Snowflake and Datadog). They decided to test the tool, which promised to provide the features that ManoMano most needed at an affordable price. Finout proved to be the ideal solution for ManoMano mainly due to its user-friendliness.

With many developers all working on different projects and using multiple cloud-based services, Finout makes it easy for each to monitor the total costs of his/her own project and identify ways to keep costs down.

The Results of Onboarding Finout’s Cloud Observability Platform

Wide-spread adoption

Since onboarding Finout, approximately 160 people (one-third of the tech department) have become registered users. In most cases, one person per team has been designated as the official Finout user, responsible for regularly checking the dashboard, providing information and updates, and sharing them with their team members.

Greater financial awareness across the company

There has been a clear shift in company culture, especially among the engineers, who are much more in tune with the financial implications of their actions. A recent major update required the replication of a large amount of features - this was a high-cost event, but there is no doubt that the real-time updates and clear visualization of all related costs ensured that the budget was adhered to and the cost per feature decreased.

Improved collaboration

Overall, there has been increased collaboration among the technology, financial and business teams, leading to greater confidence among senior leadership that costs are being managed appropriately. As usage and familiarity with the tool increases, individual employees are getting better at identifying areas where they may be overspending and can cut costs. This has resulted in a huge time-saver for the one person who had been responsible for cost-cutting prior to the adoption of Finout.

Reduced carbon footprint

Environmental sustainability is a major priority at ManoMano. They have found Finout to be helpful at attaining this goal as well. With Finout, it is easy to identify the exact compute needs and which servers may have been running for no reason. By eliminating unnecessary usage, the company is reducing their spend as well as their carbon footprint.