In a multi-cloud environment, billing data comes in fragmented, inconsistent formats - AWS uses CUR (Cost and Usage Report), GCP uses BigQuery export, and Azure has EA/Cost Management APIs. To truly understand and optimize spend, you need to harmonize this data into a single, queryable source of truth.
This article explains how we do exactly that using Retool + SQL warehouses, and why it's the foundation of effective cloud cost governance.
✅ The Challenge: Inconsistent Data = Poor Visibility
Each cloud provider categorizes services, SKUs, and usage units differently:
- AWS has EC2, S3, and Data Transfer charges with unique pricing logic.
- GCP breaks down spend by SKUs like "N2 CPU Core" or "Cloud Functions Invocations".
- Azure uses meters, GUIDs, and often lacks consistent labels or tagging.
You can't compare apples to apples without a mapping and normalization layer.
🧠 The Solution: Centralized Data + Custom Harmonization with Retool
We help teams create a centralized billing warehouse (usually in BigQuery or Snowflake) that ingests raw billing data from AWS, Azure, and GCP. Then, we use Retool as the UI layer to query, map, and visualize it.
Here's what we typically build:
✅ Schema mapping: Match similar services across clouds (e.g., EC2 ≈ Compute Engine ≈ Azure VMs)
✅ SKUs normalization: Standardize usage units (e.g., vCPU-hours, GB-months)
✅ Tag harmonization: Align custom labels like team, env, cost_center, etc.
✅ Retool UIs:
⚙️ How We Build It with Retool
- Data storage: BigQuery, Snowflake, or Postgres as the central warehouse
- Ingestion: Scheduled ETLs or cloud-native exports (e.g., CUR → GCS → BQ)
- Mapping UI: Retool tables with editable mappings (drag/drop or dropdown mapping)
- Analysis UI: Drill-down dashboards, multi-SKU search, resource-level filtering
- Workflow hooks: Add new mappings, resolve untagged resources, flag anomalies
All built within Retool's drag-and-drop interface, fully controlled by your internal teams.
🔍 Results from Our Clients
💡 A FinOps team at a global SaaS company used our harmonized billing model to:
- Save 18% just by identifying redundant SKUs across clouds
- Improve reporting time by 5x - from 1 week/month to daily
- Cut engineering review time by 70% (thanks to unified SKU dashboards)
🎯 Why This Matters
Without harmonized billing data:
- You can't run true multi-cloud optimizations
- Finance and DevOps fight over inconsistent numbers
- You miss out on quick wins hiding in billing line items
With a unified layer built in Retool, your team gets clarity, control, and the confidence to scale cloud usage smartly.
💬 Want to see a demo or get a quick audit of your current setup? Ping us at info@widle.studio
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