About PandaDoc
Founded in 2011, PandaDoc improves the running of small and medium-sized businesses by putting document creation, management, tracking, and e-signing in one place. PandaDoc helps their customers decrease document creation time and increase close rates and average sales prices.
PandaDoc’s FinOps challenge
As a company committed to adopting a FinOps methodology, the PandaDoc team understood the critical need for accurate cost information to be accessible to both business and engineering managers. Because their infrastructure is based on AWS and Kubernetes, and resources are shared across Kubernetes clusters, they needed help finding an efficient way to allocate costs correctly across different products and features.
The native solutions, such as AWS Cost Explorer and OpenCost proved inadequate for the company’s needs. The lack of a unified view of both AWS and Kubernetes costs demanded an arduous manual process to gather the necessary data for proper cost allocation.
The search was on for a solution that could automate this process and deliver cost insights tailored to the different stakeholders' specific needs and decision-making requirements within the organization.
“The native tools like Cost Explorer and Kubecost didn’t allow us to create a proper dashboard with a combination of AWS and Kubernetes costs - but Finout does this easily”
Ivan Polonevich | DevOps Team Lead
Why Finout?
After evaluating various options, Finout was declared the ideal solution for PandaDoc offering several key benefits as well as unmatched value for money:
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Unified cost view - Finout seamlessly integrates cost data from both AWS and Kubernetes, providing a holistic view of cloud spending. This eliminated the need for multiple tools while solving the cost allocation challenge.
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Scalability - While PandaDoc currently only uses AWS, they wanted flexibility in adding additional cloud providers as they grow. Finout’s scalability can accommodate this growth, readily combining Kubernetes costs with other cloud providers.
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Transparent & cost-effective pricing - Unlike other solutions, Finout charges a yearly fee based on cloud spend. This transparent, locked-in pricing structure eliminates concerns about unpredictable expenses based on usage
“Kubecost requires their application to be deployed inside each Kubernetes cluster, which uses significant compute resources that we need to pay for. Finout does all of this under the hood at no additional cost to us.”
Ivan Polonevich | DevOps Team Lead
The results of onboarding Finout’s cloud observability platform
“The onboarding process was awesome - the customer support team is excellent and always available to answer any questions. I give them 5 stars!”
Ivan Polonevich | DevOps Team Lead
PandaDoc’s primary objective in adopting Finout was to achieve granular cost allocation. This was the first step in their overall plan to cultivate a FinOps mindset throughout the organization, empowering individual teams to manage their costs effectively and understand their impact on the bigger picture. Following successful cost allocation with Finout, the next phase would involve leveraging Finout’s recommendations for proactive cost optimization and reduction.
Initial results have been impressive and include:
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90% cost allocation - Finout has enabled PandaDoc to allocate nearly all of their cloud costs to specific teams and features.
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50% time savings - Eliminating manual cost calculations has yielded significant time savings for engineering teams.
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Simplified cost management - Replacing multiple cost management tools with Finout has led to a more efficient and user-friendly process.
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Strong foundation for FinOps adoption - By focusing on the basic FinOps principles first, PandaDoc has laid the groundwork for cost optimization going forward.
“Before Finout, I had pages and pages of instructions explaining how to access data to calculate total costs and apply discounts manually. Now it’s all done automatically.”
Ivan Polonevich | DevOps Team Lead
Next steps for PandaDoc and Finout
PandaDoc plans to continue to prioritize FinOps as a core methodology across the entire company, from management to engineers.
As the use of Finout continues to grow and expand within the organization, individual units will be empowered to create and manage their own budgets. This granularity will serve a double purpose: engineers will be better equipped to identify cost-optimization opportunities, while business managers will gain the insights necessary to conduct more informed cost-benefit analyses when evaluating feature development.
