Frugal Origin Story

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The Frugal story started a few months back when I was chatting with a startup founder who was venting about how much they were spending on AWS. I used to be on the board of a successful FinOps company—CloudCheckr—which was acquired by NetApp years ago. Surely this problem has been solved by now?

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Turns out, not even close. Startups and enterprises alike are still getting crushed by cloud bills. And now, with AI being added to virtually every app, things are getting worse not better.

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Why are cloud bills still so crazy? I asked my co-founder Craig. Like many big hairy problems, the answer was deceptively simple. “Developers don’t know what it will cost to run their code in production and by the time costs spiral out of control, they’re too busy shipping features to fix it. Customer priorities always win.”

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“Do you think AI could help solve this?” I asked.

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“Let’s find out,” he said.

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After months of toiling, testing, and tinkering—Craig started to see signs that it might just work. We pulled together a core team of rockstar engineers - Rob, Khalil and Nevon. Time to build!

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Shift Left on Cost

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Cloud computing and managed services have massively boosted developer productivity—but they’ve also made it dangerously easy to burn through cash. What started out as cheap can quickly become wildly expensive. The core problem is a lack of cost visibility for developers. Applications rely on usage-based managed services, but developers get no feedback on how their code impacts cost. Eventually, FinOps spots the skyrocketing bills—but they don’t know which team is responsible. And even when they do, developers are too busy to fix it. Sound familiar?

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We’ve seen this story before with quality, security and other non-functional requirements. Security becomes a problem so we put pen testers late in the process to test and kick back issues to dev to fix. Then we woke up and said – hmm, wouldn't it be smarter to be doing this as we code vs. after?

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At Frugal, our mission is to make cost a first-class citizen for developers. It’s time to shift left on costs.

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AI Agents for Application Cost Engineering

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We’ve tried throwing dashboards, alerts, and savings plans at the problem but costs continue to skyrocket. Turns out, infrastructure waste is only part of the story. The untapped opportunity? Your application code.

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Meet Frugal—the first AI-powered cost optimization platform built for engineers, not just finance. We help developers find and fix the inefficiencies buried in code that are quietly draining cloud budgets. Frugal traces cloud costs back to the code that caused them—and then helps fix it with AI.

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From excessive metrics reporting to inefficient AI model calls - we surface it, quantify the impact, and provide code fixes. No guesswork, no finger-pointing, just clear, actionable insights that make your app more efficient.

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Frugal adds value in two ways: 1) we identify and fix production code inefficiencies and 2) Frugal integrates into the CI/CD process to keep things running efficiently. As you code, you're alerted to potential cost hotspots, and with a single click, Frugal generates a pull request to optimize it, before it ever hits production.

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Frugal is different

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1. AI Cost Engineering: We analyze your observability and billing data—then trace cloud costs back to the lines of code driving them.
2. Beyond Infra: While others right-size infrastructure to match your app’s consumption, Frugal reduces consumption itself—storage, logs, AI models, and more.
3. Developer-First: We speak your language. Frugal integrates into your workflow, not the other way around. We empower devs to understand and address costs.
4. Fast ROI: Frugal doesn’t just highlight problems. It fixes them—automatically generating pull requests to eliminate wasteful calls like redundant S3 writes or excessive AI model queries.
5. Reducing carbon footprint: Efficient apps use less energy. Less energy = less carbon. Frugal is a win:win for pocket books and the planet.

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If you’ve ever been told “optimize later” only to watch your AWS bill triple, Frugal is for you.

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We’re currently working with early design partners. If you want to be part of the next wave of intelligent cost engineering, join our waitlist or reach out—we’d love to hear from you.

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Stay frugal.

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— The Frugal Team

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