As demonstrated by forward-thinking organizations and shared through the FinOps Foundation’s community stories, this case reflects practical strategies enterprises are using to reclaim control over cloud and SaaS spend.
When one of the world’s most successful SaaS companies decided to modernize its infrastructure through Hyperforce, its global public cloud transformation, the impact wasn’t just architectural. It was financial.
Suddenly, thousands of engineering teams had direct influence over spending. New services were spinning up across regions, scaling up overnight, or being left to idle for weeks. Finance teams saw rising bills but couldn’t explain them. Product owners didn’t know if their services were efficient. Leadership lacked a framework to decide who deserved more budget and who needed to clean house.
There was no baseline. No standard. No shared KPI for cost efficiency.
That’s when this CRM leader, managing over 3,500 internal cloud services, realized it didn’t just need better tooling. It needed a scoring system.
The idea that emerged wasn’t a vendor dashboard. It was a framework. A signal. A cross-functional KPI. One that could answer a deceptively simple question across teams, services, and environments:
“How efficient are we with the money we’re spending on cloud?”
They called it the Cost Optimization Index, or COIN score, a normalized metric from 0 to 100 that objectively measured how much of each dollar spent was being wasted or well-used.
It would go on to influence budget decisions, shape OKRs, trigger re-architecture efforts, and drive a culture of friendly, gamified optimization.
This is that story. A real-world FinOps COIN score case study that shows how operationalized metrics, not just monitoring tools, can transform cost accountability at scale.
These are the exact types of problems CloudNuro.ai was built to solve, across cloud and SaaS.
The CRM enterprise had spent years refining its core engineering metrics, availability, velocity, and security. But when it came to cloud financial operations, there was a void. Despite sophisticated billing integrations and platform-level dashboards, there was no normalized way to benchmark efficiency across services. One team might be applauded for growing its customer base, while another was quietly burning compute on underutilized nodes. Finance could see the spend, but not the waste. Engineering could see the usage, but not the opportunity.
The tipping point came post-Hyperforce. Cloud-native teams were growing fast. Spend was accelerating. No signal clearly said, “This service is spending wisely” or “This team could do more with less.” The result? Budget reviews became subjective. Cost optimization was reactive. Strategic investment was speculative.
From Hackathon Idea to Operational Signal
The solution emerged not from a vendor, but from a three-day internal hackathon. An engineer on the cloud economics team built a prototype using billing data, internal service registry metadata, and telemetry from resource utilization systems. The formula was deceptively simple:
COIN Score = 1 - (Savings Opportunities ÷ Total Cost)
Scores ranged from 0 to 100. A score of 50 meant 50 percent efficient. A score of 90 meant 90 percent of the spend was well utilized. Anything below 60 raised an eyebrow, anything below 40 triggered conversations.
Within weeks, the prototype had been promoted from a demo to a pilot. Within months, it was powering budget conversations for over 3,500 services.
This level of insight is exactly what CloudNuro surfaces for IT finance leaders.
Aligning Data, Teams, and Trust
The beauty of the COIN score wasn't just in the formula. It was in the ecosystem around it. The team anchored it on three data pillars:
This allowed the metric to scale from a single service to an entire business unit, enabling both horizontal and vertical comparison.
It was also version-controlled, auditable, and built for transparency. Teams could click into their score and see the exact dollar value of opportunity by type: idle CPU, orphaned volumes, storage tiering, and even network misroutes.
They didn't just show the "what", they showed the "why."
Want to explore how your cost allocation model compares? Book a walkthrough with CloudNuro and benchmark your visibility maturity.
Normalization that Created Cultural Change
The COIN score wasn’t buried in a FinOps dashboard. It became part of the organization's broader Engineering 360 view. Every service team could see its score alongside security, availability, and agile health. Budget owners saw it monthly. VPs used it in QBRs. The CFO could roll it up to a company-wide average.
And because it was normalized, it created gamification, not as a threat, but as a motivator. Teams began asking, “How can we move from yellow to green? What’s dragging us down?” Engineers weren’t forced to care; they wanted to.
In one case, the logging platform challenged a savings assumption around storage tiering. Their argument? They didn’t retain logs past 30 days. The COIN team worked with them, validated the claim, and created a formal exception process, documented with the owner, justification, and expiry.
This drove more trust, not less. People could see that the model was governed, not gamed.
Handling Complexity at Scale
As the program matured, edge cases emerged. Some teams had credits that created negative cost. Others had savings opportunities that exceeded the total cost. The team responded by capping scores, introducing version control, and implementing guardrails to prevent stacked opportunity double-counting.
For example, if a workload was both underutilized and uncovered by a discount plan, the model applied a prioritization sequence. It would assume right-sizing occurred first, then applied discount gaps afterward. This avoided overestimating savings, a common pitfall in naive optimization reports.
CloudNuro provides the tooling to bridge these exact data gaps across SaaS and cloud environments without custom pipelines or spreadsheets.
From Pilot to Platform Metric
Within 18 months, the COIN score had become more than a metric. It was a strategic lever. It was used in OKRs. It was tied to executive investment decisions. The top engineering leaders referenced it in budget meetings. Service owners checked it before roadmap reviews.
To reinforce the positive narrative, the team partnered with sustainability leads to translate savings into environmental impact, including sequestered trees and avoided carbon. It shifted the conversation from “cutting costs” to “spending responsibly.”
Most importantly, it allowed the organization to talk about SaaS cost efficiency and cloud optimization using a single metric.
The implementation of the COIN score at this global CRM enterprise didn’t just improve cloud reporting; it reshaped how the company planned, budgeted, and held teams accountable. What began as a formula evolved into a standardized operating system for cost efficiency, embedded in engineering rhythms, finance planning, and service ownership.
This is what real FinOps maturity looks like, when visibility becomes action, and action leads to cultural change.
Before COIN, no single KPI could compare services running on different clouds, built by different teams, with different usage patterns. After COIN:
This level of transparency allowed for:
Finance could now say: “Show me the services with the lowest COIN scores under this VP.” Engineering leaders could ask: “What’s dragging down my team’s efficiency?” And platform architects could say: “Which shared services are causing systemic waste?”
CloudNuro enables this same normalization across SaaS and IaaS tools, without reinventing the wheel.
Before COIN, budget allocation was political. Some teams received more because they lobbied louder. Others were penalized for growing too fast, even if that growth was efficient. The COIN score flipped the narrative.
In monthly reviews, VPs could now show that their teams were operating at 85 percent efficiency, meaning only 15 percent of their cloud spend was considered waste. This provided hard evidence to justify additional investment.
Conversely, if a team showed a COIN score of 40, the conversation shifted. Finance would ask:
This became not just a metric, but a trust bridge between engineering and finance.
CloudNuro enables chargeback-ready cost allocation to support these discussions, without friction or finger-pointing.
At the heart of the COIN score is the concept of savings opportunity modeling. Instead of abstract metrics like “underutilization,” the team modeled dollar-based waste across a growing list of categories:
Each cost opportunity was translated into a dollar value, added to the numerator of the formula, and supported by data from trusted teams. The total opportunity was visualized in dashboards, exported to GSheets, and integrated into broader Engineering 360 metrics.
One example: A logging platform challenged the savings model for long-term log storage. The COIN team validated their use case, documented the exception, and maintained scoring integrity, proving the system wasn’t rigid, but rational.
Another example: Teams were flagged for misconfigured private IP routing that sent traffic over external gateways. Fixing this led to immediate 75 percent savings for those flows, reinforcing how COIN could surface invisible waste.
Because scores were color-coded (red, yellow, green) and exposed across dashboards, friendly competition flourished. Teams began asking:
Gamification didn’t require enforcement. It emerged naturally, supported by transparency, consistency, and the promise of reward.
Some teams even integrated COIN scores into OKRs. By the second year, leaders began tying internal performance reviews to the COIN movement. It became more than a metric; it became a reflection of engineering maturity and operational discipline.
CloudNuro supports this accountability model across teams, with allocation insights that encourage continuous improvement.
Initially launched as a prototype, COIN became a central talking point in EVP and CFO-level briefings. Why?
This clarity enabled executive buy-in. Leaders saw not just where costs lived, but where optimization could happen. They could fund efforts, staff platform improvements, and reward high performers without ambiguity.
The FinOps COIN score became a strategic planning tool, not just a retroactive audit flag.
CloudNuro enables similar strategic roll-ups by cost center, business unit, or cloud environment.
The FinOps COIN score wasn’t just another dashboard project. It was a cultural, operational, and financial shift across one of the most complex SaaS environments in the world. And while not every organization runs thousands of internal services, the lessons are broadly applicable, from startups scaling their spend to enterprises wrestling with multi-cloud fragmentation.
Here’s what the rest of the sector can learn from this FinOps COIN score case study.
Rigid models collapse under nuance. Loose models lack authority. The COIN framework struck the right balance; it was rooted in a simple, transparent formula, yet flexible enough to allow for business exceptions, evolving thresholds, and architecture-specific interpretations.
It rewarded consistency, but never punished complexity. If a high-availability database service required idle nodes, that reality was respected. If a team had no long-term logs to tier, it wasn’t penalized.
This kind of policy-backed flexibility is essential for trust, especially when FinOps metrics influence budgets and OKRs.
CloudNuro allows teams to define allocation policies aligned with reality, not just rigid scripts.
Initially, COIN was a showback mechanism, a signal for teams to review and improve. But as it matured, it became chargeback-ready. Finance began using COIN scores to justify investment, trigger optimizations, and manage resource ownership at scale.
The key wasn’t enforcement. It was education, transparency, and visual storytelling. Teams saw their waste, understood it, and acted.
The COIN team never forced a chargeback. They built the conditions for it to happen organically, with data, trust, and support.
CloudNuro supports both showback and chargeback, giving finance the data it needs without disrupting engineering workflows.
One of the most powerful shifts came when engineering leaders began including COIN scores in roadmap reviews. Instead of asking for a budget and hoping for approval, they showed their historical efficiency, current opportunities, and improvement trajectory.
This reframed the discussion from “cost justification” to “investment case.”
FinOps became proactive, not reactive. Efficiency wasn’t something teams discovered after the fact. It was something they planned for.
CloudNuro gives leaders the forward-looking data they need to tie financial discipline to roadmap confidence.
Treat SaaS Waste as Seriously as Cloud Waste
While the COIN score focused initially on IaaS and PaaS workloads, many of the same cost opportunity types apply to SaaS:
The lesson? Don’t limit FinOps practices to infrastructure. Extend them to SaaS, collaboration tools, CRM platforms, and beyond. The logic of COIN, which quantifies savings, normalizes scores, and aligns with owners, applies everywhere.
CloudNuro was purpose-built to extend FinOps from cloud to SaaS, helping you find and eliminate waste across your digital stack.
One of the most forward-thinking evolutions of the COIN score was its focus on unit economics. Instead of just tracking cost per service, teams began modeling:
This empowered mature teams to optimize beyond infrastructure. It lets them tie every dollar spent to business value delivered, turning cloud cost into a performance metric.
This is the future of FinOps. Not just controlling cost, but measuring efficiency per outcome.
CloudNuro enables cost allocation at any level, team, app, or unit of work, so you can align spend with strategic outcomes.
This FinOps COIN score case study shows what happens when a large-scale SaaS organization takes ownership of cloud efficiency, not just in tooling, but in mindset. It started with a question: how do we measure efficiency, and led to a company-wide shift in how budgets are allocated, savings are modeled, and cost decisions are made.
But you don’t need to be a global CRM provider with thousands of engineers to apply the same principles. Whether you're managing a few SaaS platforms or scaling hybrid cloud environments, the COIN model can be tailored to your stack.
CloudNuro.ai helps you build your version of this.
It’s not just about seeing spend, it’s about transforming that insight into optimization, trust, and more intelligent decisions.
Want to replicate this transformation?
Book a free FinOps insights demo with CloudNuro.ai to identify waste, enable chargeback, and drive accountability across your cloud and SaaS ecosystem.
The shift wasn’t just technical. It was cultural. The FinOps COIN score gave engineering, finance, and leadership a common language, grounded in data, driven by opportunity, and trusted across functions.
CloudNuro helps you operationalize this same model, without building it from scratch.
This story was initially shared with the FinOps Foundation as part of their enterprise case study series.
Request a no cost, no obligation free assessment —just 15 minutes to savings!
Get Started
As demonstrated by forward-thinking organizations and shared through the FinOps Foundation’s community stories, this case reflects practical strategies enterprises are using to reclaim control over cloud and SaaS spend.
When one of the world’s most successful SaaS companies decided to modernize its infrastructure through Hyperforce, its global public cloud transformation, the impact wasn’t just architectural. It was financial.
Suddenly, thousands of engineering teams had direct influence over spending. New services were spinning up across regions, scaling up overnight, or being left to idle for weeks. Finance teams saw rising bills but couldn’t explain them. Product owners didn’t know if their services were efficient. Leadership lacked a framework to decide who deserved more budget and who needed to clean house.
There was no baseline. No standard. No shared KPI for cost efficiency.
That’s when this CRM leader, managing over 3,500 internal cloud services, realized it didn’t just need better tooling. It needed a scoring system.
The idea that emerged wasn’t a vendor dashboard. It was a framework. A signal. A cross-functional KPI. One that could answer a deceptively simple question across teams, services, and environments:
“How efficient are we with the money we’re spending on cloud?”
They called it the Cost Optimization Index, or COIN score, a normalized metric from 0 to 100 that objectively measured how much of each dollar spent was being wasted or well-used.
It would go on to influence budget decisions, shape OKRs, trigger re-architecture efforts, and drive a culture of friendly, gamified optimization.
This is that story. A real-world FinOps COIN score case study that shows how operationalized metrics, not just monitoring tools, can transform cost accountability at scale.
These are the exact types of problems CloudNuro.ai was built to solve, across cloud and SaaS.
The CRM enterprise had spent years refining its core engineering metrics, availability, velocity, and security. But when it came to cloud financial operations, there was a void. Despite sophisticated billing integrations and platform-level dashboards, there was no normalized way to benchmark efficiency across services. One team might be applauded for growing its customer base, while another was quietly burning compute on underutilized nodes. Finance could see the spend, but not the waste. Engineering could see the usage, but not the opportunity.
The tipping point came post-Hyperforce. Cloud-native teams were growing fast. Spend was accelerating. No signal clearly said, “This service is spending wisely” or “This team could do more with less.” The result? Budget reviews became subjective. Cost optimization was reactive. Strategic investment was speculative.
From Hackathon Idea to Operational Signal
The solution emerged not from a vendor, but from a three-day internal hackathon. An engineer on the cloud economics team built a prototype using billing data, internal service registry metadata, and telemetry from resource utilization systems. The formula was deceptively simple:
COIN Score = 1 - (Savings Opportunities ÷ Total Cost)
Scores ranged from 0 to 100. A score of 50 meant 50 percent efficient. A score of 90 meant 90 percent of the spend was well utilized. Anything below 60 raised an eyebrow, anything below 40 triggered conversations.
Within weeks, the prototype had been promoted from a demo to a pilot. Within months, it was powering budget conversations for over 3,500 services.
This level of insight is exactly what CloudNuro surfaces for IT finance leaders.
Aligning Data, Teams, and Trust
The beauty of the COIN score wasn't just in the formula. It was in the ecosystem around it. The team anchored it on three data pillars:
This allowed the metric to scale from a single service to an entire business unit, enabling both horizontal and vertical comparison.
It was also version-controlled, auditable, and built for transparency. Teams could click into their score and see the exact dollar value of opportunity by type: idle CPU, orphaned volumes, storage tiering, and even network misroutes.
They didn't just show the "what", they showed the "why."
Want to explore how your cost allocation model compares? Book a walkthrough with CloudNuro and benchmark your visibility maturity.
Normalization that Created Cultural Change
The COIN score wasn’t buried in a FinOps dashboard. It became part of the organization's broader Engineering 360 view. Every service team could see its score alongside security, availability, and agile health. Budget owners saw it monthly. VPs used it in QBRs. The CFO could roll it up to a company-wide average.
And because it was normalized, it created gamification, not as a threat, but as a motivator. Teams began asking, “How can we move from yellow to green? What’s dragging us down?” Engineers weren’t forced to care; they wanted to.
In one case, the logging platform challenged a savings assumption around storage tiering. Their argument? They didn’t retain logs past 30 days. The COIN team worked with them, validated the claim, and created a formal exception process, documented with the owner, justification, and expiry.
This drove more trust, not less. People could see that the model was governed, not gamed.
Handling Complexity at Scale
As the program matured, edge cases emerged. Some teams had credits that created negative cost. Others had savings opportunities that exceeded the total cost. The team responded by capping scores, introducing version control, and implementing guardrails to prevent stacked opportunity double-counting.
For example, if a workload was both underutilized and uncovered by a discount plan, the model applied a prioritization sequence. It would assume right-sizing occurred first, then applied discount gaps afterward. This avoided overestimating savings, a common pitfall in naive optimization reports.
CloudNuro provides the tooling to bridge these exact data gaps across SaaS and cloud environments without custom pipelines or spreadsheets.
From Pilot to Platform Metric
Within 18 months, the COIN score had become more than a metric. It was a strategic lever. It was used in OKRs. It was tied to executive investment decisions. The top engineering leaders referenced it in budget meetings. Service owners checked it before roadmap reviews.
To reinforce the positive narrative, the team partnered with sustainability leads to translate savings into environmental impact, including sequestered trees and avoided carbon. It shifted the conversation from “cutting costs” to “spending responsibly.”
Most importantly, it allowed the organization to talk about SaaS cost efficiency and cloud optimization using a single metric.
The implementation of the COIN score at this global CRM enterprise didn’t just improve cloud reporting; it reshaped how the company planned, budgeted, and held teams accountable. What began as a formula evolved into a standardized operating system for cost efficiency, embedded in engineering rhythms, finance planning, and service ownership.
This is what real FinOps maturity looks like, when visibility becomes action, and action leads to cultural change.
Before COIN, no single KPI could compare services running on different clouds, built by different teams, with different usage patterns. After COIN:
This level of transparency allowed for:
Finance could now say: “Show me the services with the lowest COIN scores under this VP.” Engineering leaders could ask: “What’s dragging down my team’s efficiency?” And platform architects could say: “Which shared services are causing systemic waste?”
CloudNuro enables this same normalization across SaaS and IaaS tools, without reinventing the wheel.
Before COIN, budget allocation was political. Some teams received more because they lobbied louder. Others were penalized for growing too fast, even if that growth was efficient. The COIN score flipped the narrative.
In monthly reviews, VPs could now show that their teams were operating at 85 percent efficiency, meaning only 15 percent of their cloud spend was considered waste. This provided hard evidence to justify additional investment.
Conversely, if a team showed a COIN score of 40, the conversation shifted. Finance would ask:
This became not just a metric, but a trust bridge between engineering and finance.
CloudNuro enables chargeback-ready cost allocation to support these discussions, without friction or finger-pointing.
At the heart of the COIN score is the concept of savings opportunity modeling. Instead of abstract metrics like “underutilization,” the team modeled dollar-based waste across a growing list of categories:
Each cost opportunity was translated into a dollar value, added to the numerator of the formula, and supported by data from trusted teams. The total opportunity was visualized in dashboards, exported to GSheets, and integrated into broader Engineering 360 metrics.
One example: A logging platform challenged the savings model for long-term log storage. The COIN team validated their use case, documented the exception, and maintained scoring integrity, proving the system wasn’t rigid, but rational.
Another example: Teams were flagged for misconfigured private IP routing that sent traffic over external gateways. Fixing this led to immediate 75 percent savings for those flows, reinforcing how COIN could surface invisible waste.
Because scores were color-coded (red, yellow, green) and exposed across dashboards, friendly competition flourished. Teams began asking:
Gamification didn’t require enforcement. It emerged naturally, supported by transparency, consistency, and the promise of reward.
Some teams even integrated COIN scores into OKRs. By the second year, leaders began tying internal performance reviews to the COIN movement. It became more than a metric; it became a reflection of engineering maturity and operational discipline.
CloudNuro supports this accountability model across teams, with allocation insights that encourage continuous improvement.
Initially launched as a prototype, COIN became a central talking point in EVP and CFO-level briefings. Why?
This clarity enabled executive buy-in. Leaders saw not just where costs lived, but where optimization could happen. They could fund efforts, staff platform improvements, and reward high performers without ambiguity.
The FinOps COIN score became a strategic planning tool, not just a retroactive audit flag.
CloudNuro enables similar strategic roll-ups by cost center, business unit, or cloud environment.
The FinOps COIN score wasn’t just another dashboard project. It was a cultural, operational, and financial shift across one of the most complex SaaS environments in the world. And while not every organization runs thousands of internal services, the lessons are broadly applicable, from startups scaling their spend to enterprises wrestling with multi-cloud fragmentation.
Here’s what the rest of the sector can learn from this FinOps COIN score case study.
Rigid models collapse under nuance. Loose models lack authority. The COIN framework struck the right balance; it was rooted in a simple, transparent formula, yet flexible enough to allow for business exceptions, evolving thresholds, and architecture-specific interpretations.
It rewarded consistency, but never punished complexity. If a high-availability database service required idle nodes, that reality was respected. If a team had no long-term logs to tier, it wasn’t penalized.
This kind of policy-backed flexibility is essential for trust, especially when FinOps metrics influence budgets and OKRs.
CloudNuro allows teams to define allocation policies aligned with reality, not just rigid scripts.
Initially, COIN was a showback mechanism, a signal for teams to review and improve. But as it matured, it became chargeback-ready. Finance began using COIN scores to justify investment, trigger optimizations, and manage resource ownership at scale.
The key wasn’t enforcement. It was education, transparency, and visual storytelling. Teams saw their waste, understood it, and acted.
The COIN team never forced a chargeback. They built the conditions for it to happen organically, with data, trust, and support.
CloudNuro supports both showback and chargeback, giving finance the data it needs without disrupting engineering workflows.
One of the most powerful shifts came when engineering leaders began including COIN scores in roadmap reviews. Instead of asking for a budget and hoping for approval, they showed their historical efficiency, current opportunities, and improvement trajectory.
This reframed the discussion from “cost justification” to “investment case.”
FinOps became proactive, not reactive. Efficiency wasn’t something teams discovered after the fact. It was something they planned for.
CloudNuro gives leaders the forward-looking data they need to tie financial discipline to roadmap confidence.
Treat SaaS Waste as Seriously as Cloud Waste
While the COIN score focused initially on IaaS and PaaS workloads, many of the same cost opportunity types apply to SaaS:
The lesson? Don’t limit FinOps practices to infrastructure. Extend them to SaaS, collaboration tools, CRM platforms, and beyond. The logic of COIN, which quantifies savings, normalizes scores, and aligns with owners, applies everywhere.
CloudNuro was purpose-built to extend FinOps from cloud to SaaS, helping you find and eliminate waste across your digital stack.
One of the most forward-thinking evolutions of the COIN score was its focus on unit economics. Instead of just tracking cost per service, teams began modeling:
This empowered mature teams to optimize beyond infrastructure. It lets them tie every dollar spent to business value delivered, turning cloud cost into a performance metric.
This is the future of FinOps. Not just controlling cost, but measuring efficiency per outcome.
CloudNuro enables cost allocation at any level, team, app, or unit of work, so you can align spend with strategic outcomes.
This FinOps COIN score case study shows what happens when a large-scale SaaS organization takes ownership of cloud efficiency, not just in tooling, but in mindset. It started with a question: how do we measure efficiency, and led to a company-wide shift in how budgets are allocated, savings are modeled, and cost decisions are made.
But you don’t need to be a global CRM provider with thousands of engineers to apply the same principles. Whether you're managing a few SaaS platforms or scaling hybrid cloud environments, the COIN model can be tailored to your stack.
CloudNuro.ai helps you build your version of this.
It’s not just about seeing spend, it’s about transforming that insight into optimization, trust, and more intelligent decisions.
Want to replicate this transformation?
Book a free FinOps insights demo with CloudNuro.ai to identify waste, enable chargeback, and drive accountability across your cloud and SaaS ecosystem.
The shift wasn’t just technical. It was cultural. The FinOps COIN score gave engineering, finance, and leadership a common language, grounded in data, driven by opportunity, and trusted across functions.
CloudNuro helps you operationalize this same model, without building it from scratch.
This story was initially shared with the FinOps Foundation as part of their enterprise case study series.
Request a no cost, no obligation free assessment —just 15 minutes to savings!
Get Started
CloudNuro Corp
1755 Park St. Suite 207
Naperville, IL 60563
Phone : +1-630-277-9470
Email: info@cloudnuro.com
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