CloudBurn

About CloudBurn

CloudBurn is the proactive shield for your cloud budget, transforming how engineering teams manage infrastructure costs. Built for teams using Terraform or AWS CDK, it stops expensive infrastructure mistakes before they ever reach production. The traditional cycle of discovering cost overruns weeks later on an AWS bill—after resources are already running and money is spent—is broken. CloudBurn changes the game by injecting real-time AWS cost intelligence directly into your code review process, the exact moment when changes are easiest and safest to make. It empowers developers with immediate financial feedback, fostering a culture of cost-awareness and responsibility. By providing precise, automated cost estimates for every pull request, CloudBurn turns reactive bill-shock into proactive cost optimization. It’s more than a tool; it’s a fundamental shift towards automated FinOps, ensuring your team can innovate with confidence, speed, and financial control. Stop letting your infrastructure costs spiral in the dark. With CloudBurn, you see the dollar impact of every line of code, enabling smarter decisions that protect your bottom line from day one.

Features of CloudBurn

Automated Pull Request Cost Analysis

CloudBurn automatically analyzes every infrastructure pull request, providing instant cost visibility without any manual intervention. When a developer opens a PR with Terraform or AWS CDK changes, the system seamlessly calculates the financial impact and posts a detailed report as a comment. This automation embeds cost governance directly into your existing CI/CD workflow, making financial review a natural and effortless part of the development lifecycle.

Real-Time AWS Pricing Data

Get accurate cost estimates based on the latest, region-specific AWS pricing. CloudBurn pulls real-time data to ensure every calculation reflects current on-demand rates for services like EC2, Fargate, and more. This eliminates the guesswork and inaccuracies of static spreadsheets, giving your team confidence that the projected costs are precise and up-to-date for your specific deployment environment.

Resource-Level Cost Breakdown

Understand the exact source of cost changes with a detailed, line-item breakdown. The cost report clearly shows each resource affected, its current cost, its new projected monthly cost, and the delta. This granular visibility, down to the hourly price and usage type, empowers developers to pinpoint expensive configurations and make informed trade-offs during the design phase.

Seamless GitHub Integration

CloudBurn is built for developer workflow, integrating 100% through GitHub for maximum security and simplicity. Installation is handled via the GitHub Marketplace, and billing and permissions are managed through your GitHub account. The tool works by connecting to dedicated GitHub Actions for Terraform Plan or AWS CDK Diff, creating a secure and streamlined experience with immediate setup.

Use Cases of CloudBurn

Preventing Costly Misconfigurations

Catch simple but expensive errors before deployment, such as accidentally specifying an xlarge instance instead of a micro. CloudBurn highlights these discrepancies in the PR review, allowing the team to discuss and correct them immediately. This prevents surprises that could add thousands of dollars to the monthly bill and avoids the risky, time-consuming process of refactoring in production.

Enabling Developer-Led FinOps

Empower your development teams to own cost management by giving them the tools to see the financial impact of their architectural decisions in real-time. CloudBurn fosters a culture of cost-awareness, where developers can optimize for performance and budget simultaneously, making FinOps a collaborative and integrated practice rather than a centralized, after-the-fact audit.

Budgeting for New Features & Projects

Accurately forecast the infrastructure cost of new initiatives during the planning phase. By analyzing the code for a new feature or microservice in a pull request, teams can get a reliable monthly cost estimate before any resources are provisioned. This enables better project scoping, budgeting, and stakeholder communication from the very beginning.

Optimizing Existing Infrastructure

Use CloudBurn to assess the cost impact of optimization efforts, like right-sizing instances or migrating to spot instances. Create a pull request with the proposed changes and receive an immediate report on the potential monthly savings. This provides a data-driven justification for refactoring work and ensures the optimization delivers the expected financial return.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does CloudBurn calculate the cost estimates?

CloudBurn calculates estimates by analyzing the infrastructure diff from your Terraform Plan or AWS CDK Diff output. It uses real-time AWS Pricing API data for your specified region to compute the monthly cost for each new or modified resource based on standard on-demand usage (730 hours per month). The report provides a detailed breakdown, including hourly rates and usage types for full transparency.

Is my code or cloud credentials exposed to CloudBurn?

No. CloudBurn follows a secure, integration-first model. Your code never leaves your GitHub repository. The cost analysis is triggered by a GitHub Action running in your own workflow, which sends only the resource diff (a list of resource types and configurations) to CloudBurn's analysis engine. Your AWS credentials or direct access to your cloud environment are never required or exposed.

What infrastructure-as-code tools does CloudBurn support?

CloudBurn currently provides native, automated support for the two most popular IaC frameworks: HashiCorp Terraform and AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK). For each tool, a dedicated GitHub Action captures the plan or diff output and facilitates the integration. Support for additional tools is considered based on community feedback.

Can I use CloudBurn for free?

Yes. CloudBurn offers a Community plan that is free to use forever. You can also start with a 14-day trial of the Pro plan to experience advanced features. The Pro trial requires no credit card and you can cancel anytime, reverting to the Community plan. This allows teams to evaluate the tool's full value risk-free.