Pattern 1.6

The Consumers Aren’t the Payers

When the people consuming a resource don’t see its bill, consumption grows unchecked.

In This Context

Shared resources such as cloud services are consumed by engineering teams but billed to a P&L higher up the hierarchy or in a different part of the business. Anyone who has run up a large personal cloud bill learns quickly to optimize it; at work, the pain of the bill is felt by someone else, so that lesson isn’t learned. The same applies to an internal platform that business units use without paying.

The spender and the payer are different people.
Feedback about cost arrives late, if at all, and to the wrong person.

Therefore

Make consumption visible to the people consuming, before asking them to pay (Showback Before Chargeback). Teams that are more directly incentivized to lower costs are far more likely to find savings.

Consequently

Teams can see and act on their own spending.
But left alone, spending grows unchecked, as the people spending don’t feel the cost.
But moving straight to billing teams can make them reshape the system around the bill (see Chargeback in a Crisis).

Seen In

Chapter 2, figure “Spending your own money on the cloud versus spending your employer’s: at work, the pain of the bill is felt by someone other than the spender”.