Duckbill’s High-Stakes Pivot: From Cloud Cost Whisperers to Software Innovators

In a move that’s sending ripples through the cloud computing industry, Duckbill, the consulting firm co-founded by the irreverent cloud cost guru Corey Quinn, has announced a bold transformation from services to software. With $7.75 million in fresh funding and a new platform called Skyway, Duckbill is positioning itself as the financial planning and forecasting software for infrastructure—a contrarian bet in a crowded market.

The Contrarian Thesis: Predictability Over Savings

While the cloud cost management sector, commonly known as FinOps, has been fixated on making bills smaller, Duckbill’s founders argue that the real problem is predictability. “Finance doesn’t lose sleep over whether your cloud bill is $1 million or $100 million,” Quinn said in a news release. “They lose sleep when it jumps 30% and nobody can explain why.”

This insight comes from years of negotiating tens of billions of dollars in cloud contracts for clients like Airtable, Ticketmaster, and New Relic. Duckbill’s clients, on average, spend $70 million a year on cloud infrastructure—well above the $1 million annual minimum that AWS requires for a private pricing contract. At that scale, patterns and problems emerge that don’t exist for smaller companies.

From Services to Software: A High-Stakes Pivot

Duckbill’s pivot into software is not without risk. The company, based in San Francisco, is transforming from a consulting firm into a software company, a move that will eventually cannibalize a portion of its consulting business. However, CEO Mike Julian sees this as an opportunity rather than a threat. “Big companies need services,” he said, pointing to companies like ServiceNow and CrowdStrike that built major software businesses while maintaining significant services revenue.

The first module of Skyway, called Contract Manager, converts private pricing deals into structured data, validating that customers are getting discounts they negotiated and projecting spending. The bigger vision extends well beyond AWS, with plans to structure spending data across every piece of software and infrastructure a company uses, from SaaS tools like Datadog and Snowflake to AI providers like Anthropic and OpenAI.

The Crowded Market and the Vega Cloud Cautionary Tale

The market for cloud cost management technology is crowded and difficult. The latest casualty is Vega Cloud, a Spokane-area startup that entered receivership after raising millions in financing. However, Julian contends that it’s not really one market. Companies like Point5 focus on workload optimization, while others like Finout specialize in cost allocation. He sees Duckbill as doing something different: building financial planning and forecasting software for infrastructure.

The AI Factor: Making Costs Harder to Predict

At the same time, AI is making it harder to predict cloud costs. “Cloud spend is already one of the largest and least predictable line items in the enterprise,” said Joseph Ruscio, general partner at Heavybit, one of the firms backing Duckbill’s pivot. “AI infrastructure is about to compound that volatility.”

Duckbill currently has 10 employees and plans to grow to 15 by the end of the current quarter and 20 by year-end, with most of the new hires in engineering. The company also hired Jim Moses, who previously worked at AWS as a private pricing negotiator, as director of hyperscaler strategy, essentially putting someone from the other side of the table on their team.

Lessons from Failure: The 2022 Product Attempt

It’s not the first time Quinn and Julian have tried to build a product. In 2022, Duckbill attempted to make the leap from services to software, but it was an “abject failure,” as Quinn acknowledged in a video discussion with Julian, released by the company as part of the announcement. “Turns out that if you just assume you know what customers want and don’t talk to them, you’re gonna go somewhere, but not where you wanted to go,” he said.

The Duckbill Difference: AI Candy and Clean Data

Duckbill isn’t using artificial intelligence in its own product yet, which will not surprise anyone familiar with Quinn’s aversion to industry hype. However, by bringing structure to messy spending data, Skyway is positioned to create what Julian calls “AI candy”—clean, labeled information that customers can put to use in their own systems.

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