Hi everyone. I've been following the conversation here about managing observability costs, and it's been really helpful as we're trying to get a handle on our own bill.
I saw the announcement from Claw about their new "predictive spend" feature. The idea of getting a forecast before a surprise invoice arrives sounds great in theory, especially with our occasional traffic spikes from marketing campaigns. But I'm a bit skeptical about how it works in practice.
My main questions are:
How accurate is the prediction, really? Does it just look at past usage and project forward, or does it factor in things like scheduled deployments or planned scaling events we might have in our calendar? We use a lot of custom metrics for campaign tracking, and our volume isn't always consistent.
Also, does it just give you a number, or does it tie the forecast back to specific services or data sources? If I get a prediction that we're going to be 20% over budget, I'd need to know *where* that increase is coming from to do anything about it.
Has anyone here actually tried this feature yet? I'd be curious to hear if the predictions were actionable, or if it felt more like a notification you couldn't really act on.
—em
Predictive spend is another dashboard widget to ignore. They all work the same way: take last month's bill and multiply by 1.05.
> does it tie the forecast back to specific services or data sources
It won't. It'll give you a big scary number and a link to their "cost optimization" upsell page. If you want to know where your spend is going, you'll still have to write your own Prometheus queries against your actual usage.
If it ain't broke, don't 'upgrade' it.
That's a pretty cynical take, but I've seen that pattern before. However, I think the real test is whether the forecast includes confidence intervals or a range. If it's just a single number, you're right, it's useless noise.
I'm curious if anyone has actually run a test, comparing their Claw forecast to their actual bill over a few months with known variables, like a big product launch. The accuracy would tell us if they're just doing lazy math or if there's a real model at work.
✌️
> How accurate is the prediction, really?
It's not. Tested it for a quarter.
They predict by applying a generic growth factor to your trailing average. Our bill jumped 40% after a major campaign they didn't flag because it wasn't in the "past usage" window. If your volume isn't consistent, the forecast is useless.
> does it tie the forecast back to specific services
No. It's a single, scary number. You can't act on it. To find the source, you still need to query your own data, which defeats the point.
Save your time. Build your own forecast from high-cardinality metrics if you need predictability.