For any startup with ambition, the cloud is like oxygen. It fuels innovation, powers growth, and lets them compete with giants. But what happens when the oxygen tank comes with a cryptic, ever-increasing bill? Suddenly, the tool that enables their freedom becomes a source of frustration—a cloud bill as unpredictable as it is unavoidable.
To understand how startups are truly experiencing this daily battle, we had the opportunity to use the TNW 2025 conference to speak with a mix of start-up founders, both CEOs and CTOs, from across the tech landscape. Their insights reveal a shared set of challenges that go far beyond the monthly bill, touching on visibility, resource allocation, and the fundamental difficulty of planning for an unpredictable future. We extend our sincere thanks to all the leaders who shared their time and candor to make this article possible. This is the story of the cloud cost conundrum, told in their own words.
Core Challenges: The View from the Trenches
Through our conversations, four key themes kept surfacing. These are not just isolated technical issues but intertwined business challenges that can impact strategy, stall projects, and hamper the pace of how a start-up can scale.
1. The Visibility Gap
The most common frustration is a simple lack of clarity. Many leaders feel they are flying blind, unable to connect costs to business value or identify what’s driving up their expenses, which makes proactive optimization nearly impossible.
Surajeet Bhuinya , CEO of DataPebbles, captured this perfectly, highlighting the danger of hidden fees that go unnoticed until it's too late. “I think sometimes you don't know what is bleeding you,” he explained. “The biggest challenge for a non-technical company is all these hidden costs of network packets and this and that... which many people don't think about.”
This extends beyond hidden fees to a perceived lack of honesty from providers. Timon Vonk, Founder & CTO of Bosun.ai, argued his ideal solution is more transparency: “I think a very honest solution would be if they did do these kind of things more honestly,” Timon stated. “Just give me something fast with transparent costs and show me the actual usage so that I can scale to the problem.”
2. The Reactive Trap
For many early-stage companies, cloud infrastructure is set up to fuel growth, and costs are either not a problem since they are still in very early development, or they are often treated as a secondary concern until they become a pressing problem. This leads to a reactive cycle of management, where teams only analyze their spending at the end of the month, long after the money has been spent.
Ratikanta Rana, Founder of Kookxtra, confirmed this is a common workflow. When asked if his process was mostly retrospective, his answer was direct: “Yeah, we do it. But proactively, we are unable to look at costs at this moment because we are still in a scale-up mode.”
This approach is born from necessity, as founders prioritize product development and market fit. Ederik van Koldenhoven 🎁, Co-Founder & CTO of Cadeo, echoed this, admitting that focus only shifts when something breaks. “You put the infrastructure there, you kind of leave it as it is until it actually challenges you,” he said. This “set it and forget it" approach works until it doesn’t, resulting in a scramble to fix performance issues or deal with a surprisingly high bill, the very definition of the reactive trap.
The Next Web. (2025). [Photograph of TNW 2025 Conference]. Retrieved from TNW's media resources.
3. The People Problem
The underlying cause of the reactive trap is often due to a simple lack of resources, time, and dedicated personnel. In a small, agile team, every member must wear multiple hats. The specialized, continuous effort required for effective cloud financial management, or FinOps, rarely fits into anyone's job description.
The ideal solution, for many, isn't a new tool but a more hands-on method. When asked what his "magic wand" solution would be, Ederik of Cadeo didn't hesitate. It was about personnel: “For us, it's more like having a person to actually do it... basically having enough investment money to hire somebody that can do that in a dedicated role.”
This highlights a critical disconnect. While the industry buzzes about complex FinOps strategies, the reality for many startups is that there is simply no one with the bandwidth to implement them. The cost of hiring a dedicated expert is often far greater than the perceived savings, leaving teams to muddle through with limited time and focus.
4. The Scaling Dilemma
For a startup, growth is everything, but scaling cloud infrastructure brings its own set of financial headaches. The challenge is twofold: ensuring you have enough capacity to handle unpredictable peaks in demand while simultaneously finding ways to eliminate waste during quiet periods.
Hendrik Wolleswinkel 🎁, Co-Founder at Cadeo, described their predictable-yet-sharp scaling needs: “We see a peak towards the end of the year where there's a lot of volume... like Christmas gifting... and that's where we scaled up... and then we could scale it back down again once things cooled off.” For others, the pattern is less clear. Krylo Melnychuk, Founder & CTO of Uspacy, stated his primary goal is to “reduce our overall spending during nights and during non-peak hours,” a common desire that requires significant automation to achieve effectively.
The wrong architectural choice can lead to costs that grow exponentially. As Timon of Bosun.ai warned from his experience with serverless technology, “They sell it to you as pay-as-you-go. It's relatively cheap. But the moment you get any form of continuous load or scale; the costs are not a couple of times more but are 100 times more [expensive].” This dilemma places founders in a high-stake balancing act between preparing for success and ensuring that success doesn't bankrupt them.
The Next Web. (2025). [Photograph of TNW 2025 Conference]. Retrieved from TNW's media resources.
From Conundrum to Control
The experiences of these startups paint a remarkably consistent picture. The core prognosis is clear: to escape the cycle of poor visibility, reactive management, and the constant pressure of scaling, companies must treat financial efficiency as a core engineering practice, not a retrospective accounting task. This means the future of cloud cost management isn’t about better dashboards or more detailed reports, it’s about intelligent systems that work with developers, preventing waste before it ever happens and ensuring innovation never slows down because of an unexpected bill.
This forward thinking approach is precisely the mission we are dedicated to at Yasu.cloud. The challenges outlined by these leaders are not just talking points; they are the exact use cases that our AI cloud engineer is designed to solve. Instead of adding to the manual workload with another complex platform, Yasu acts as the autonomous team member many founders wish they could hire. By embedding directly into your team’s workflow, within CI/CD pipelines, Slack, and Github, Yasu shifts cost visibility to the left, thereby helping developers prevent costly mistakes before they reach production. Our hope is to assist in mastering the cloud cost conundrum so that your team can do what it does best: innovating without hesitation.