The Conflict of Interest Test

1. How does the vendor make money when you overspend?

Most cloud-cost platforms price as a percentage of your cloud spend. Sit with that: the more you waste, the more they earn. Their revenue is structurally tied to the size of the problem, not the size of the fix.

CloudRift's answer: CloudRift is flat-priced. Your bill to us does not grow with your cloud bill — so the only way we grow is by being worth it.

2. Can they show you a receipt?

Ask for proof that savings actually happened — a before/after from real billing data, per fix. Most tools stop at recommendations, so they can't prove outcomes; the recommendation queue becomes your team's backlog and the savings stay theoretical.

CloudRift's answer: Every fix CloudRift executes lands in a Realized Savings Ledger with a verification lifecycle: estimated from the scan, confirmed when a later scan proves the resource is gone, billing-verified when the charges cease in your own billing data. Exportable as a receipt.

3. What is the evidence behind each recommendation?

A recommendation without evidence is an opinion. If the tool cannot show you the utilization history that justifies "delete this" or "downsize that," you are being asked to trust a black box with production infrastructure.

CloudRift's answer: Every CloudRift finding carries its evidence: 30/60/90-day CPU and network history, a deterministic plain-English explanation, and a confidence grade that says exactly how much telemetry backs it. The same input always produces the same explanation.

4. Who executes the fix — and what gates it?

Visibility without execution means the savings depend on your team finding time. Execution without gates means a tool can break production. Ask precisely where the tool sits between those two failure modes.

CloudRift's answer: CloudRift executes approved fixes — behind explicit human approval, every time. Read-only by default; write access exists only for fixes you approve, and deletion runs through two approval gates.

5. What happens to the price when your cloud grows?

Percentage pricing is a meter that runs against your growth. Success — more workloads, more revenue, more cloud — silently raises what you pay the tool that was supposed to protect you.

CloudRift's answer: Flat tiers. Growing from $10k to $100k of monthly cloud spend changes your CloudRift bill by exactly nothing.

The pledge

• We will never price as a percentage of your cloud spend.
• We will never report a saving we cannot show you the verification for.
• We will never change your infrastructure without your explicit approval.
• We will never ship a recommendation without the evidence that justifies it.

The day we break any of these, we have become the thing this page warns you about.