About Qonto

Qonto is a leading European Fintech offering a comprehensive business finance management platform for freelancers and SMEs across Europe. Their user-friendly platform simplifies banking, bookkeeping, and expense management, enabling their customers to focus on growth.

Qonto’s FinOps Challenge: Scaling Without Losing Control

As a growing company, Qonto relies heavily on cloud infrastructure to deliver customer services and support internal operations. Their infrastructure - hosted on AWS and encompassing 15 Kubernetes clusters and numerous databases - grew significantly more complex following a recent acquisition that introduced GCP into their technology stack.

Three critical challenges emerged:

1. Managing and retaining huge volumes of data from multiple staging environments and diverse sources, with a need to retain this data for 1-2 years to enable long-term trend analysis.
2. Allocating shared tool costs across teams and departments working on different applications and features despite clear visibility into total spend.
3. Identifying the specific sources of waste within their infrastructure, despite knowing that resources were being over- or underutilized or inefficiently deployed.

Qonto's existing tools were inadequate, forcing teams to spend excessive time searching for cost-saving opportunities. Qonto realized the need for a single, comprehensive platform that could serve every department effectively and eliminate reliance on multiple disparate tools.

Why Finout: Beyond Traditional Cost Management

Qonto needed more than “just another dashboard.” They sought a sophisticated platform capable of handling complex shared cost allocation while leveraging their existing data sources, including Prometheus. Finout’s virtual tagging feature was the major selling point, enabling Qonto to consolidate data from all sources and allocate costs accurately, providing clear visibility into how much each team was spending and how much each application or feature was costing.

Time-saving was a clear priority for Qonto. Finout’s real-time virtual tag updates provide immediate insight into cost anomalies and spending patterns. This clear view of resource allocation helps teams quickly identify and address urgent issues and make more informed business decisions.

Results: Transforming Cloud Cost Management

Since implementing Finout, Qonto has realized significant improvements in cost management and operational efficiency.

Specific results include:

• Effortless Cost Allocations: Over 80% of cloud spend is allocated accurately and efficiently to each team and application through virtual tags that update in real time. Teams access up-to-date cost data with a simple page refresh.
• Cost Reduction: Qonto targeted their highest expense - log storage costs - and achieved a 40% reduction through the optimization of high-cost areas and log usage. 
• Time Savings and Efficiency: The Megabill feature’s search and filtering capabilities enable teams to investigate anomalies and find answers to any question within 3-5 mouse clicks, saving more than 50% of the research time.
• User Adoption: While the complexity of previous tools prevented most employees from accessing needed information independently, Finout’s simplicity has driven widespread adoption across departments.
• Collaboration and Alignment: Finout serves as a single source of truth, ensuring that all team members and stakeholders access the same data and can make aligned decisions.
• Unit Economics Insights: The unit economics feature, with its detailed cost-per-customer and cost-per-developer metrics, enables more informed resource-allocation decisions and enhances the tracking of return on investment.

Looking Ahead: Strategic Growth Through Cost Intelligence

As Qonto's business expands, its cloud spending will grow, but with Finout, every dollar will be tracked, justified, and optimized to ensure cloud investments drive business value. Through detailed visibility into cost-per-customer metrics, usage trends, and resource allocation, Qonto can maintain control of cloud costs even as they scale.