“Our monitoring bill keeps going up”
CFO · Observability
A CFO who won't sign anything that charges by data volume has seen monitoring costs grow faster than the business, and wants a bill they can predict. Don't argue about price per unit. Make the bill predictable first: ask what drove last year's increase, and what they'd need to forecast it with confidence.
Practise it before the real call
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What the buyer says
Our monitoring bill went up again this year. I won't sign anything that charges by data volume.
How to handle it
Listen
Hear "went up again" and "by data volume". The worry is unpredictability more than the absolute cost.
Acknowledge
Agree that a bill that grows with every new service is hard to budget for, and that finance needs to forecast it.
Explore
Ask what drove last year's increase: more services, more logs, more users, or pricing changes. Ask what they'd need in order to forecast the cost with confidence: caps, commitments, alerts or a different pricing basis.
Respond
Explain clearly how your pricing works, what would make it grow, and what controls they'd have to keep it predictable. If your pricing is also volume-based, say so, and show how they'd stay in control of it.
Say this
“That makes sense. A bill you can't predict is hard to budget for.”
Say this
“What drove the increase last year?”
Say this
“What would you need to see to forecast the cost with confidence?”
Variations
- VP Engineering: “We had to switch off logging to keep the bill down.”
- Procurement Director: “Usage-based pricing is a blank cheque.”
Questions people ask
How do you respond when a CFO is worried about the cost of observability?
Agree that unpredictable bills are hard to budget for. Ask what drove last year's increase and what they'd need to forecast it, then explain exactly how your pricing works and what controls they'd have to keep it predictable.
Why do observability costs grow so quickly?
Many observability tools charge by the amount of data collected, such as logs, metrics and traces. As companies add services and users, the data grows, and so does the bill, often faster than expected.
More objections in Observability
- “We can't send our logs to a vendor”
- “Outages haven't hurt us”
- “Teams won't instrument their code”
- “We already have three monitoring tools”
Practise it before the real call
Free to start. No credit card.