“We’ve raised a pile of money, and we’re building a product.”
That’s the characteristically deadpan announcement Wednesday morning from Corey Quinn, the cloud cost consultant who has built a second career, basically, on his sharp and irreverent takes on Amazon Web Services in his popular podcasts and newsletters.
Duckbill, the consulting firm that Quinn co-founded with Mike Julian, is making what amounts to a high-stakes pivot: transforming into a software company with a new platform called Skyway that aims to make cloud spending more predictable for large companies.
The company, based in San Francisco, announced $7.75 million in funding from Heavybit, Uncork Capital, and Encoded Ventures to accelerate product development and grow its 10-person team.
Their contrarian pitch: the cloud cost management sector, commonly known in the industry as FinOps, is fixated on making bills smaller, when the real problem is that nobody can predict what the costs will be next month.
“Finance doesn’t lose sleep over whether your cloud bill is $1 million or $100 million,” Quinn said in a news release. “They lose sleep when it jumps 30% and nobody can explain why.”
Julian, Duckbill’s CEO, said in an interview that the company came to realize that existing cloud cost management tools are built by startups, for startups, for the most part. Many of Duckbill’s large enterprise clients had tried those tools, rejected them, and ended up building their own.
“I have a hypothesis that the people building in FinOps today come from startups and not from enterprise, so they don’t even know many of the problems exist,” Julian said.
Duckbill’s clients, which include companies such as Airtable, Ticketmaster, and New Relic, spend $70 million a year on cloud infrastructure, on average. (Tagline for their consulting business: “Cloud cost management for the nine-figure club.”) That’s well above the $1 million annual minimum that AWS requires for a private pricing contract. At that scale, Julian said, you start to see patterns and problems that don’t exist for smaller companies.
All told, the company says it has negotiated tens of billions of dollars in cloud contracts, giving it unique insights. (“Our schlep is our moat,” reads one of its internal whiteboards.)
Skyway’s first module, called Contract Manager, converts private pricing deals into structured data, validating that customers are getting discounts they negotiated, and projecting spending.
The bigger vision extends well beyond AWS. Duckbill started with a specialization in Amazon’s cloud platform but has expanded into Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Julian said the ultimate goal is to structure spending data across every piece of software and infrastructure a company uses: SaaS tools like Datadog and Snowflake, AI providers like Anthropic and OpenAI, and even legacy data centers for customers still using their own mainframes.
Julian acknowledged that the pivot into software will eventually cannibalize a portion of Duckbill’s consulting business, but said he doesn’t expect it to disappear entirely. Big companies need services, he said, pointing to companies like ServiceNow and CrowdStrike that built major software businesses while maintaining significant services revenue.
The market for cloud cost management technology is crowded, and difficult. The latest casualty: Spokane-area startup Vega Cloud, which entered receivership after raising millions in financing.
But Julian contends that it’s not really one market. Companies like Point5 focus on workload optimization. Others like Finout specialize in cost allocation. He sees Duckbill as doing something different: building financial planning and forecasting software for infrastructure.
Duckbill isn’t using artificial intelligence in its own product yet. This will not surprise anyone familiar with Quinn’s aversion to industry hype. However, by bringing structure to messy spending data, Skyway is positioned to create what Julian calls “AI candy” — clean, labeled information that customers can put to use in their own systems.
At the same time, AI is making it harder to predict cloud costs.
“Cloud spend is already one of the largest and least predictable line items in the enterprise,” said Joseph Ruscio, general partner at Heavybit, one of the firms backing Duckbill’s pivot, in the press release announcing the funding. “AI infrastructure is about to compound that volatility.”
Duckbill currently has 10 employees and plans to grow to 15 by the end of the current quarter and 20 by year-end, with most of the new hires in engineering. The company also hired Jim Moses, who previously worked at AWS as a private pricing negotiator, as director of hyperscaler strategy, essentially putting someone from the other side of the table on their team.
It’s not the first time Quinn and Julian have tried to build a product. In 2022, Duckbill attempted to make the leap from services to software. It was an “abject failure,” as Quinn acknowledged in a video discussion with Julian, released by the company as part of the announcement.
“Turns out that if you just assume you know what customers want and don’t talk to them, you’re gonna go somewhere, but not where you wanted to go,” he said.
In addition to its website, Quinn noted, Duckbill can be reached at 833-AWS-BILL.
“He is not joking,” Julian said.
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