DevZero Doesn't Tax Your Savings

The more you save on infrastructure, the less you spend on us.

We don't believe in taxing your savings, so we're doing the opposite of other vendors.

Imagine a software chip that makes your car get 40 miles per gallon instead of 10. The vendor says that in addition to paying a monthly fee for the chip, you'll be charged 20% of what you save on gas, as determined by what you would have spent had you not installed the chip.

Doesn't the price of gas change over time, you ask? Yes, says the vendor, but don't worry, we're going to recalculate monthly, using our own gas pricing index.

What if I drive less this year because I change jobs and have a shorter commute? Well, that's your choice, says the vendor. This is about what you would have saved had all the variables in your life remained the same.

How are you calculating my fuel spend each month? We record the change on your odometer and apply our proprietary formula to determine what you should have spent on gas for that mileage, with and without the chip.

What if I cancel and return the chip early? You owe us 20% of the gas you would have saved for the time you would have continued driving with the chip.

That's a blend of how our competitors price infrastructure optimization. Several charge based on the infrastructure savings they claim to have generated for you, relative to a counterfactual baseline they calculate. Some charge based on the number of CPUs you ran before optimizing. Some add a monthly fee on top. One, notably, charges for future savings on "commitment-based discounts" if you cancel.

Effectively, these vendors grade their own homework. They don't have an objective way to deal with savings they didn't generate. What if you streamline a service, such that it requires less compute? They may claim credit for the savings.

How DevZero Does Pricing Instead#

1. We charge on your optimized infrastructure, not your pre-optimized infrastructure. Our software improves infrastructure performance and reliability and, as a byproduct, reduces wasted compute. By running DevZero, you will use fewer CPUs. It's not right to charge you for 10,000 CPUs if, thanks to our platform, you now use 5,000. We'll charge on the 5,000.

   Specifically, we charge $5 per CPU core-month, down to the minute, in arrears. So, 43,800 minutes of CPU usage counts as one core-month. We calculate this from the same, verifiable data that cloud providers use to calculate your bill. There's no arbitrary calculation based on what you could have or would have spent.

2. The more aggressively you optimize, the less you spend on DevZero. This is counterintuitive, isn't it?

   With DevZero, you choose how many clusters or nodes to optimize, and you choose how aggressively to optimize. You could start at 30% optimization (low), jump to 50% (medium), and then go to 70% (high) if you feel comfortable.

   The more aggressively you optimize, the fewer CPUs you'll run. The fewer CPUs you run, the less CPU core-months you'll rack up.

   You can adjust the policy as often as you'd like. For example, if you know traffic spikes during the first week of each month, set a less aggressive policy that week to maximize reliability. For the rest of the month, optimize more aggressively to reduce costs.

   Our system is designed to keep your workloads up and running. We autonomously scale without restarts (horizontally and/or vertically) to ensure uptime and performance, regardless of your optimization level.

3. No annual contract, no upfront commitment. We don't require annual contracts because we can demonstrate the value you're getting every single month. Our autonomous optimization platform goes to work quickly and does its job continuously. Without ongoing optimization, problems with performance, reliability, and waste return.

   For DevZero, this model is about credibility and trust. Every month, the cloud bill and usage metrics will speak for themselves. If they don't, you're free to end our service.

4. Our pricing calculator makes it all transparent. Input how many CPUs you run and their cost. Specify committed/on-demand vs. spot/preemptible if you'd like. Then choose how aggressively to optimize. Again, notice that as the cloud savings increase, what you pay DevZero falls.

To run with the car analogy, DevZero charges for the chip based on the number of cylinders actively firing in the engine. Unfortunately, the analogy breaks down here because we improve the performance of your infrastructure. It's like we're quadrupling your gas mileage and halving your 0-60 time. The gas savings are yours to keep.

If your business grows and needs to use more CPUs, core-months will rise proportionally. Hopefully, that means you're launching new products, serving more customers, and generating more revenue. We'll be there throughout, helping you optimize performance, reliability, and cost.

To be clear, we have nothing against contingency fees based on outcomes. We have a problem with recurring contingency fees based on counterfactual savings calculated by a vendor with incentives to exaggerate the savings.

The more you save with DevZero, the less you pay us.