Inspiration
The idea for Kloud View came from our personal frustration at previous startups trying to answer a simple question: What cloud services do we currently use and how much are we spending each month?
How it works
Kloud View utilizes Context.io receipt parsing to find relevant receipts from cloud service providers like Slack, Salesforce.com & Amazon Web Services. We us this data to build a picture of all the different cloud services that a company uses and how much they spend each month.
Challenges I ran into
When we first came up with the idea we thought we would be able to hook into the service provider API to get information about spending, usage, etc. However, we found that most service providers don't provide this type of administrative API. We then starting thinking about other ways we could get this data. Most startups use Google Apps, so we started exploring the Gmail API to see if we could get the data from email. One night we came across Context.io and their concept of email as a database made a lot of sense, so we implemented it.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Having started a company before we wanted to take all the lessons learned and apply it to Kloud View. This meant building a lightweight prototype and focusing on getting to product/market fit before building out the entire platform.
What I learned
Initially using email to get the data didn't really feel like an elegant solution. However, the more time we spent using Context.io the more we started to realize the potential of email as a database.
What's next for Kloud View
- Add more service providers to the directory.
- Add historical spending analytics.
- Add uptime history to service provider profile.
- Add comparative analytics - for example, here is how your company compares to other companies like you.
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