CloudBurn

About CloudBurn

CloudBurn is the revolutionary FinOps guardrail that stops AWS cost overruns before they happen, directly inside your developer workflow. Built for engineering teams using Terraform or AWS CDK, it transforms how you manage cloud spend by shifting cost visibility left. Instead of discovering budget-busting mistakes weeks later on a shocking AWS bill, CloudBurn provides real-time, automated cost analysis for every infrastructure change during code review. When a developer opens a pull request, CloudBurn instantly calculates the exact monthly cost impact using live AWS pricing data and posts a detailed, line-item report as a comment. This creates a powerful feedback loop, empowering teams to discuss, optimize, and adjust costly configurations before deployment, when changes are cheap and easy. It’s more than a tool; it’s a cultural shift towards proactive cost ownership, turning every engineer into a cost-conscious architect. By embedding financial accountability into the CI/CD pipeline, CloudBurn delivers immediate ROI, prevents costly misconfigurations, and finally breaks the cycle of reactive, panic-driven cloud cost optimization.

Features of CloudBurn

Automated Pull Request Cost Analysis

CloudBurn seamlessly integrates with your GitHub workflow to provide automatic, hands-off cost reporting. Every time a pull request with Terraform or AWS CDK changes is opened, the system triggers. It captures the infrastructure diff, analyzes it against real-time AWS pricing APIs, and generates a comprehensive cost report that is automatically posted as a comment in the PR thread. This eliminates manual estimation work and ensures no change slips through without financial scrutiny.

Real-Time AWS Pricing & Regional Breakdown

Forget outdated spreadsheets or generic estimates. CloudBurn pulls live pricing data directly from AWS Price List APIs, ensuring every cost calculation reflects the current on-demand rates for your specific deployment region and configuration. The report breaks down costs per resource, showing the current cost versus the new monthly cost, so you see the exact dollar impact of upgrading an EC2 instance type or adding a new RDS cluster in us-east-1 versus eu-west-1.

Resource-Level Cost Diff Visibility

The tool provides unparalleled granularity, showing a clear before-and-after financial picture for each modified or new resource. The PR comment displays a table listing each resource (e.g., MyThirdInstance, firstTaskDef), its current monthly cost, its projected new monthly cost, and the delta. This resource-level breakdown pinpoints exactly which line of code is driving the spend, enabling precise, informed discussions during review.

Seamless GitHub Integration & Security

CloudBurn is installed in minutes via the GitHub Marketplace, with billing, setup, and permissions handled 100% through GitHub. There are no separate logins or sensitive AWS keys to manage in a third-party platform. You grant repository access, and CloudBurn works securely through GitHub Actions, making adoption frictionless for developers and compliant with enterprise security standards.

Use Cases of CloudBurn

Preventing Costly Developer Mistakes

A developer accidentally commits a change configuring an EC2 instance as x1e.32xlarge instead of t3.micro. Without CloudBurn, this $3,000/month mistake deploys silently and is only caught on the next bill. With CloudBurn, a glaring $2,900+ cost increase is flagged in the PR comment during review, allowing the team to catch and correct the typo instantly, saving thousands.

Enabling Data-Driven Architecture Reviews

During a design change to migrate to Fargate, the team debates different CPU/memory configurations. Instead of guessing, they open a draft PR. CloudBurn immediately provides the monthly cost for each proposed task definition, allowing for an informed, data-driven discussion about the price-performance trade-off before any infrastructure is provisioned.

Implementing Proactive FinOps Culture

Engineering leadership wants to decentralize cost responsibility but lacks a scalable mechanism. By integrating CloudBurn, they embed cost awareness directly into the development lifecycle. Every engineer gets immediate feedback on their financial impact, fostering a culture of ownership and proactive optimization without requiring constant oversight from a central FinOps team.

Optimizing Existing Infrastructure Changes

A team is tasked with right-sizing underutilized production resources. For each optimization PR—like downgrading instance types or adjusting auto-scaling limits—CloudBurn quantifies the projected monthly savings right in the review. This validates the effort, prioritizes high-impact changes, and celebrates wins by showing the direct savings from their code changes.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does CloudBurn calculate the costs?

CloudBurn uses the official AWS Price List API to fetch real-time, region-specific, on-demand pricing for every service you use. It parses the output of terraform plan or cdk diff from your GitHub Action, identifies the resources being created, modified, or destroyed, and maps each resource configuration to its corresponding AWS pricing dimensions to compute an accurate projected monthly cost.

Is my code or cloud infrastructure data secure?

Absolutely. Security is a core principle. CloudBurn is installed via GitHub and operates through GitHub Actions. Your code never leaves your repository. The analysis is performed on the structured diff/plan output, which contains resource types and configurations, but not sensitive state data or secrets. All billing and permissions are managed through your GitHub account.

What infrastructure-as-code tools do you support?

CloudBurn currently supports the two most popular IaC frameworks: HashiCorp Terraform and AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK). For Terraform, you use the Terraform Plan PR Commenter GitHub Action. For AWS CDK, you use the AWS CDK Diff PR Commenter Action. Both capture the necessary change data for CloudBurn to analyze.

Can I use CloudBurn for free?

Yes! CloudBurn offers a Community plan that is free forever. You can also start with a 14-day Pro trial to experience advanced features like cost history, team reporting, and SLA guarantees. After the trial, you can choose to subscribe to the Pro plan for enhanced capabilities or continue using the robust feature set of the Community plan at no cost.