New Features: SSO, Multi-user support, Monthly Budgets, ‘Short’ Slack Cost Reports and more

Here is a summary of all the new features we’ve released in 2021. As always, thank you all so much for the feedback. Francois and I are listening, and we will continue to make incremental improvements to CloudForecast with the learnings and feedback provided directly from you all. To summarize:

• Single sign-on
• Multi-user support
• “Short” option for Slack Cost Reports
• Monthly Budgets
• Premium Support Estimate
• Credits and Discounts Breakout

Read below for more details into each one!

Single sign-on

With our partnership and integration with WorkOS, we now have Single sign-on available for all our users as an add-on to your plans. We support all the popular identify providers (Google SAML, Okta, JumpCloud, etc.) if SSO is a requirement for your organization.

The pricing add-on is flat and simple, $99/month add-on for the first 10 users. You can read more about this here in our documentation: CloudForecast Single sign-on Docs.

Multi-user support

Related to Single sign-on, we now have multi-user support for CloudForecast. This will open up the ability for your team members to log in to CloudForecast and create their own costs management reports, access externally linked graphs, see full report history and provide access to other features that requires logging into our application.

Reach out to Francois or I when you are interested in enabling SSO & multi-user support for your CloudForecast account: [email protected]

“Small” Slack AWS Cost Management Reports

This was a popular feature request, especially with our users sending multiple Daily AWS Cost Management Reports via Slack to their team members. You now have the option to enable a “short” version of the Slack cost report’s or a “long” version.

The short version will include important details such as Forecast Alerts to detect cost anomalies, and a quick summary of daily costs, 7-day average, month to date estimate and end of the month estimate.

To supplement the short version, there is a link back to the CloudForecast app for the Full Report. This is where SSO and Multi-user can be helpful and powerful since log-in is required to view the full report.

Monthly Budgets

This was a surprising popular requests from our user since AWS Budgets is a feature in Cost Explorer. My guess is that the AWS Budgets feature can be time consuming to setup and difficult to scale for larger team’s.

With CloudForecast’s Monthly Budget feature, you now have the ability set a Monthly Budget for any of your Daily Cost Management Reports setup in CloudForecast. This feature will track the budget input against both your End of the Month Estimate (typically more accurate than AWS estimate) and your actual Month to Date Total Spend:

To help reduce the noise, you also have the ability to adjust Alert Frequency. You can have Forecast Alerts for your budgets once a week, twice a week or included in all reports. That way your team is only alerted if there is a possible overrun of cost, trending the wrong way and when something is actually happening:

Premium Support Estimate

Calculating AWS Premium Support has always been super tricky since it is custom for each AWS customer and is not documented. If you are paying for premium support, we’ll start to look at previous months to better estimate the cost and have it included in your End of the Month estimate.

Credits and Discounts Breakout

This was a minor feature request to provide better visibility into AWS Credits and Discounts you are receiving. In the “Monthly Data” section, we now give you visibility into the total amount of Credits and Discounts you are receiving from AWS for both Last Month and Month to Date total costs.

This is a lot for the new year and hot start for us in 2021. This is not including other features that are in final beta that we plan on releasing officially in the coming weeks:

• ZeroWaste AWS Cost Optimization Report
• Why? Drill-down Grid
• Monthly Tagging Compliance Report

Feel free to reach out to us to let us know other areas we can improve on! We wold love to hear your feedback.