Infrastructure Cost Tracking Template

For SaaS companies, infrastructure costs typically range from 10-25% of revenue in the early stages and decrease to 5-15% at scale. If your infrastructure costs exceed 25% of revenue, optimization should be a priority. Track this metric monthly alongside your other [product metrics](/glossary/prioritization) to spot trends early.

Make costs visible and attributable. Tag every resource by team, publish monthly cost-by-team reports, and include infrastructure cost as a metric in quarterly planning. When engineers can see that their service costs $4,200/month and compare it to peer teams, they self-optimize. Some organizations include a "cost per user" target in engineering OKRs.

Reserved instances (or savings plans) for predictable, always-on workloads like databases and core application servers. Spot instances for fault-tolerant batch processing, CI/CD pipelines, and development environments. The savings are significant: 30-60% for reserved, 60-90% for spot. The [Technical PM Handbook](/technical-pm-guide) covers how to evaluate these trade-offs.

Monthly at minimum. Weekly reviews are better for teams that are actively optimizing or experiencing rapid growth. Set up automated alerts for anomalies (cost spike > 20% day-over-day) so you catch runaway spend before the monthly bill arrives.

Estimate the infrastructure components the feature requires (compute, storage, database, network), size them based on projected usage, and price them using your cloud provider's calculator. Add a 30% buffer for unknowns. Compare this estimate against the feature's expected revenue impact using the [RICE calculator](/tools/rice-calculator) to determine whether the investment is justified. ---