CloudHealth - Expensive but It Actually Works for Big Multi-Cloud Bills

I've used CloudHealth at three companies over the past four years. The UI is from hell and setup takes forever, but the cost allocation actually works when you're managing millions in cloud spend across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

The Real Deal: What It Actually Does

CloudHealth sucks up billing data from your cloud providers and tries to make sense of where your money is going. Unlike tools that just show you pretty charts, it can actually allocate costs down to specific teams and projects - assuming you've done the hard work of tagging everything properly (spoiler: nobody has perfect tagging). Compare it to other FinOps platforms and you'll see the allocation capabilities are genuinely better.

The platform connects to AWS, Azure, GCP, and even some on-prem VMware stuff. Data usually shows up within 24 hours, though AWS detailed billing can lag by up to 3 days. If you need real-time cost monitoring, check cloud cost optimization tools that offer faster refresh rates.

Setup Hell and Onboarding Reality

Their onboarding team assumes you have perfect resource tagging and clean account structures. In reality, you'll spend 2-3 months just getting your data organized enough for CloudHealth to provide useful insights. Budget 40+ hours of engineering time for initial setup.

The API rate limits will bite you if you're doing bulk data exports. We hit the limit trying to pull historical data for 200+ AWS accounts and had to spread the requests over several days. Check API best practices to avoid this pain.

Who Actually Owns This Thing?

CloudHealth started as an independent company, got bought by VMware in 2018, and now belongs to Broadcom after their VMware acquisition.

Broadcom's track record with acquisitions isn't great - they tend to milk products for revenue rather than innovate. The June 2025 update added some AI features, but jury's still out on whether they're useful or just marketing bullshit. Compare with newer FinOps platforms that are AI-first by design.

The Brutal Pricing Reality

CloudHealth costs 2.2-2.5% of your tracked cloud spend. If you're spending $500K monthly, you're looking at $132K-150K annually just for the privilege of understanding your bills. Add professional services for setup and you're easily hitting $200K+ in year one.

For context, that's more than most companies pay for their entire DevOps toolchain.

Real pricing examples from recent contracts:

• $2M/month cloud spend = $480K-600K annual CloudHealth fees
• $500K/month cloud spend = $132K-150K annual fees
• $200K/month cloud spend = $52K-60K annual fees (minimum contract applies)

The percentage model creates a perverse incentive - CloudHealth makes more money when your costs go up, not when they optimize them down. See CloudHealth pricing alternatives for fixed-fee options that align incentives better.

The June 2025 CloudHealth update added AI features that everyone's talking about. I've been testing them for three months alongside other FinOps AI tools and enterprise AI automation platforms. Here's what actually works and what's just expensive ChatGPT integration.

Intelligent Assist: ChatGPT for Your Cloud Bill

The "AI co-pilot" is basically a ChatGPT wrapper that can query your cost data. You can ask "show me EC2 costs for the marketing team last month" and it'll generate a report.

What works:

• Basic queries like cost breakdowns by team or service
• Generating simple charts and summaries
• Explaining why costs went up (if the data is clean)

What doesn't work:

• Complex multi-dimensional analysis (it gets confused)
• Anything requiring deep context about your architecture
• Recommendations beyond obvious stuff like "turn off unused instances"

Reality check: It's faster than clicking through their UI hell, but you could build this yourself with the OpenAI API and their existing CloudHealth APIs. Other AI-powered cloud cost tools like CloudPilot AI offer similar features at lower cost. Paying 2.5% of cloud spend for a chatbot feels steep.

Smart Summary: Automated Obvious Insights

Smart Summary emails you daily about cost changes. Example: "Your S3 costs increased by $1,200 yesterday due to new buckets in us-west-2."

This would be useful if it wasn't 24-48 hours behind. By the time you get the alert, someone on Slack has already asked why the bill spiked. Real-time alerting works better - use something like nOps or even AWS Budget alerts. Check out cloud cost optimization best practices for better alerting strategies.

The Optimization Dashboard: Finally, Some Sense

This is actually the best part of the update. Instead of drowning you in 500 optimization recommendations, it prioritizes the high-impact stuff:

• Reserved Instance opportunities over $10K/year
• Unattached EBS volumes over $100/month
• Instances running at <5% CPU for 30+ days
• Commitment discount gaps

Pro tip: Export the data and build your own dashboard. CloudHealth's visualization is still terrible, but the prioritization logic is solid. Tools like Grafana or Tableau work better for visualization. See cloud cost optimization assessment guides for more dashboard ideas.

Real Cost Impact Analysis

Here's what nobody tells you about CloudHealth's ROI claims:

• Setup costs: $50K-100K in professional services
• Annual license: $132K-150K for $500K monthly spend
• Internal time: 0.5 FTE minimum to manage and interpret data

You need to save $200K+ annually just to break even. For most companies, a combination of AWS Cost Explorer, Kubecost, and some custom scripts gets you 80% of the value for 20% of the cost. Check alternative FinOps tools for cheaper options.

When It Actually Makes Sense

CloudHealth works when:

• You're spending $1M+ monthly across AWS, Azure, and GCP
• You have dedicated FinOps team members
• Complex chargeback requirements across 50+ business units
• Regulatory compliance needs for cost tracking
• Your current manual processes cost more than $200K/year in engineering time

Success stories I've seen:

• Fortune 500 retailer saved $2.3M annually through automated rightsizing (after $400K CloudHealth investment)
• Financial services company eliminated 40 hours/week of manual reporting (but took 6 months to set up properly)
• Healthcare org achieved SOX compliance for cloud cost allocation (worth the pain for them)

For everyone else, the AI features are expensive automation of stuff you should be doing manually anyway.

The break-even calculation:
If your internal cost of manually tracking and optimizing cloud spend is less than CloudHealth's annual fee, skip it. Most companies under $200K monthly spend can get 80% of the value from native cloud tools and basic automation scripts. Consider alternatives like CloudZero or Finout for smaller scale deployments.