Cloud benchmarks worth quoting
The numbers we use ourselves when we walk into a room. Public sources are linked so you can verify; our own design-partner observations are clearly flagged. All third-party numbers are publicly published; click the source URL to verify. Internal numbers are flagged as such. As we hit ~50 customers we'll add an opt-in anonymised cohort comparison.
Savings unlocked
How much of the cloud bill mature FinOps teams (established 2+ years) typically recover year over year.
If you're at <10% you're early; >25% means you're top-decile.
Tagging hygiene
Most teams have decent surface tagging — what's missing is consistent ownership and customer attribution tags.
Aim for 95%+ on owner tag, 80%+ on customer_id within a quarter.
Commitment posture
Best-in-class teams sit at 70%+ coverage with a 1-year, no-upfront ladder. Under-commitment is the #1 cause of missed savings we see at audit time.
<30% means double-digit % of bill is recoverable instantly.
Wasted spend
Self-reported by CIOs/CFOs. The gap between this and what we typically recover (15-25%) is the room to over-promise.
If you don't know — you're not alone. ~60% of teams don't measure this.
Anomaly response
Real-time anomaly detection flips this: teams catch a runaway test job in hours instead of weeks.
Same-week alerting is the cheap unlock — Slack-out-of-the-box.
Per-customer P&L
Most teams only spot this at the aggregate-margin level. Per-customer breakdown reveals 1-3 high-leverage repricing decisions.
Even one repriced bleeder usually pays for our annual contract.
AI / GPU economics
Big spread by use-case: chat assistants ~$0.30, code assistants ~$2.10, agent platforms ~$8+.
>$3 per user means it's time to add prompt caching + model routing.
Time-to-value
Time from connecting a cloud account to the first acted-upon recommendation. Includes the 7-day lookback window.
We aim to hit single digits for everyone by mid-2026.
Around customer #50, we'll add a third "lane" to every benchmark: the median across opt-in CARTIE AI customers. It's the only way to answer "how do I compare to teams my size, with my workload mix?" — and it's what we wish existed when we were running cloud bills ourselves.
Privacy: cohort numbers are aggregated, anonymised and require a minimum of 5 contributors per cell. No customer data leaves their tenant. Customers can opt out at any time and their data is removed from the cohort within 30 days.