In the world of enterprise tech, building first and budgeting later is still surprisingly common. FinOpsly, a startup focused on controlling cloud, data, and AI costs, wants to end that with Costix, a new AI-powered estimation tool designed to bring cost visibility to the very start of any infrastructure initiative.
Unveiled today, Costix flips the traditional cloud planning script by generating deployment-ready solution blueprints, validated workload specs, and a detailed bill of materials (BoM)—all from a simple description of what a team wants to build. The kicker? It does it in under five minutes, long before a single resource is provisioned.
“We built Costix to give teams a fast, reliable way to plan infrastructure costs upfront, using data they can trust,” said Kiran Jain, CEO and Co-Founder of FinOpsly. “Every dollar spent should be traceable, defensible, and actionable.”
Why This Matters: Cloud Spend Still Bleeds
Despite years of hype around FinOps and cloud cost optimization, many enterprises still rely on spreadsheets and hand-wavy guesses to estimate what new features or workloads might cost. That’s not just inefficient—it’s expensive. A Flexera report from 2021 estimated that over 30% of cloud spend is wasted due to poor planning and visibility.
Even the best cloud-native calculators fall short. They’re rigid, require deep technical detail upfront, and lack support for multi-environment comparisons. In fast-paced product teams, they’re often skipped entirely.
Costix aims to fix this blind spot.
AI-First, Architecture-Aware Planning
Where most tools ask for granular input, Costix starts from intent. Product and engineering teams describe what they want to build—say, a new AI feature, a data pipeline, or a multicloud workload—and Costix uses agentic AI to guide the design, flagging config trade-offs and compliance concerns along the way.
It draws from a live database of cloud SKUs, best-practice architectures, and common workload assumptions, auto-generating validated specs for compute, storage, and network needs across dev, test, and production environments.
The result? A real, usable solution plan and cost estimate, not just a static price projection.
Bill of Materials Meets Business Context
Costix doesn’t just stop at the tech specs. It creates a contract-aware, taggable bill of materials, mapped to business units, usage tiers, and cost centers. This BoM can feed directly into procurement, finance, or stakeholder decks—shortening cycles for approvals, reviews, and funding.
That’s especially valuable for pre-sales and customer-facing teams, who often struggle to translate customer asks into costs without waiting for engineering to spec things out.
From Cloud Problem to Systems Problem
“Cost control is no longer just a cloud problem. It is a systems problem across cloud, data, and AI,” Jain said.
That’s a telling statement. As companies increasingly converge their infrastructure across AI platforms, data lakes, and hybrid clouds, the financial complexity only grows. Costix helps teams align earlier, reducing risk and bridging gaps between engineering, product, sales, and finance.
Real-World Use: Beyond Estimation
According to FinOpsly CTO Mueen Delvi, what sets Costix apart isn’t just its speed or AI—it’s the blueprints. “It turns business inputs into compliant solution designs—not just cost projections—giving teams a launch-ready starting point from day one.”
That means a faster path from idea to execution, with fewer surprises when deployment starts.
Competitive Context: A Missing Layer in the FinOps Stack
While cloud cost visibility platforms like CloudHealth, Apptio Cloudability, and Harness focus heavily on post-deployment tracking and optimization, Costix brings cost intelligence upstream, enabling scenario planning, cross-team alignment, and architectural validation before budgets get blown.
It also addresses a glaring gap in native tools: AWS, Azure, and GCP calculators still assume you already know what every virtual machine or bucket will look like. Costix, by contrast, builds those assumptions for you—and flags them when they don’t make sense.
Power Tomorrow’s Intelligence — Build It with TechEdgeAI.
