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