Your alternatives
Your alternatives
You have eight other options, and one of them is often the right answer. Every function we perform exists somewhere. Nobody who holds your contracts, your budgets, and your purchases in one record is paid only by you: the advisers who are paid only by you hold none of those, and the platforms that hold some of them are paid by sellers, by a share of savings, or stop at the hyperscalers.
| Option | What it gets you | Where it runs out |
|---|---|---|
| Keep the bill in a FinOps tool and the contracts in a spreadsheet | Flexera, Apptio, CloudZero, and Vantage see the hyperscaler bill and automate hyperscaler commitments; Ramp governs token spend for free; Tropic tracks AI vendor contracts and benchmarks the rates | Vantage meters GPU usage on CoreWeave and Nebius clusters at rates you supply; none of them ingests a GPU cloud’s contract, commitment, or invoice, authorizes a project before it spends, or measures what an allocation delivered on your work. The record ingests what they hold |
| Hand the whole problem over | Andromeda, Modal, or Baseten pool capacity across a hundred providers, certify it, and send you one invoice. For many buyers this is the right product, and our readiness answer will say so | You contract with them, not the supplier, and the record they keep is theirs. If finance has to defend the purchase, or your work cannot leave your own agreements, you need the baseline |
| More interruptible capacity at your incumbent | About a third of the modeled opportunity, with no second contract, no cross-cloud transfer, no vendor review, and no fee to us | Caps at your incumbent’s own discount, and buys nothing where the incumbent is merely dearer |
| Negotiate a bigger commitment | The single largest and cheapest lever most buyers have | Deepens concentration and lengthens the take-or-pay. Nothing for the burst above the floor, and a bigger floor to administer |
| Add one specialist cloud yourself | Most of the price gap for one vendor review. Often the right first move, and it is our second baseline | One counterparty, one price. You find out what you overpaid when the second quote arrives |
| Run a router | SkyPilot or Cast AI place work at the cheapest catalog entry across clouds. Good software, with named customers and SOC 2 | Solves the routing half. Does not write the requirement, run a quote round, qualify a supplier’s balance sheet, hold your contracts, or write a baseline before the decision. Where you run one — SkyPilot, Kubernetes, Slurm, Ray — the desk tells it where to route and dispatches through it; we never replace it |
| Hire an adviser paid only by you | NPI Financial and UpperEdge validate invoices, benchmark rates, and run negotiation playbooks for AI agreements, and NPI states that vendors do not compensate it | Advice and a managed service for the agreement, without the record that holds your contracts and budgets, the engine that prices your work, or the purchase. Where you have one, the record gives them better inputs |
| Buy through a marketplace or a broker | Compute Exchange runs a quote auction with verification; Compute Desk gives away a deal desk; SF Compute lets you resell what you no longer need; brokers bring supply you cannot reach | Paid by the sell side or on the deal. No standing baseline, and no reason to tell you the answer is stay put. We would buy and sell through them rather than compete with them |
Before you add a supplier at all, try moving the same work to your incumbent’s own interruptible tier: on our default fleet that captures $0.87M of the $2.53M opportunity, at close to zero integration cost. Judge us on the remainder, and on what we add over the fifth row — and on whether a record that holds every commitment is worth keeping on its own.