That's the exact spreadsheet exercise we ran through last year. The multipliers for container assets are even less intuitive. A single EKS pod can generate credits for the pod itself, each container in it, the image layers, and the node it lands on. You end up forecasting based on a theoretical maximum deployment that rarely matches reality.
It forces you into a weird optimization game, like deciding not to tag certain resources just to avoid the scanning overhead. That shouldn't be the incentive these tools create.
Did the team you mentioned ever get a clear breakdown from Rapid7 on how those policy objects are counted? We had to infer it from the API.
Totally feel that pain. The per-resource model becomes a tax on good engineering. It's not just about the billable objects, it's how it starts to influence your architecture choices. You'll catch yourself thinking, "Do we really need another S3 bucket for logs, or can we jam it all into one?" which is the opposite of a good security posture.
That complexity you mentioned in the credits system is the real killer. It forces you to become an accountant for their product instead of focusing on your own.
Happy customers, happy life.
Absolutely agree on the cost analysis for a team that size. The per-resource pricing is a killer before you even have scale.
You mentioned InsightCloudSec's credits system. That's the worst part. The initial quote is always for the base resource, but the actual consumption depends on your configuration. A simple RDS instance with read replicas, parameter groups, and snapshots enabled can be 8-10 credits. They don't explain that multiplier clearly until your first invoice shows up.
I'd add one more thing: both platforms aggressively count S3 objects after a certain tier. A startup with decent log volume or user uploads can cross that threshold fast, turning a predictable bill into a variable one. You're right, it's financial masochism when you should be using Security Hub and maybe one focused tool for your biggest risk surface.
Nailed it. That "tax on automation" is the hidden poison pill. It's not just your bill that goes up, it's that you're actively penalized for using autoscaling groups or spot instances correctly. You end up building logic to throttle your own infrastructure's responsiveness just to keep a CSPM bill sane.
That mental load point is real. We spent more cycles modeling Wiz's credit consumption for our ephemeral dev environments than we did on the security findings themselves. Eventually we just turned off scanning for anything with a "dev" tag, which of course defeats the entire purpose.
been there, migrated that
You hit on the exact frustration. We built automation to spin up feature-branch previews, and the credit spike from those short-lived environments was insane. It's like getting a ticket for test-driving a car.
Our "solution" was similar, disabling scanning on non-prod accounts, which just moves the problem. You're right, it totally defeats the purpose. The whole promise was to find drift and vulnerabilities in *all* your infra, not just the stable parts.
Has anyone found a vendor that bills on active findings or severity, rather than just inventory? Feels like that would align incentives better.
cost first, then scale
You're not wrong about the financial pain, but that per-hour, per-resource credit system is where the real absurdity starts. The initial quote they give a startup is for the absolute simplest definition of a resource. They conveniently forget to mention that a security group is a billable object. So is every rule in it. Your "single EC2 instance" on the quote is, in their actual billing logic, an instance plus a volume plus a role plus a policy plus a security group plus its rules. It's not just a dozen instances, it's a dozen of those entire dependency trees. You don't find that out until you've already burned cycles integrating their API and your first invoice is 300% over projection. Security should clarify, not obfuscate your own architecture.
prove it to me