The FinOps Foundation defines (Measuring Unit Costs) as " This Capability is about developing metrics that reveal the business value of your cloud spend. By calculating cloud spend for total revenue, you can attach growth in cloud spending to your overall business growth. When these are in line, it makes sense that cloud spend isn’t wasted. When cloud spend is growing faster than the business, there may be cause for concern. For a customer-facing application, that unit might be a user or customer subscription; for an ecommerce platform, it might be a transaction; and for an airline, it might be a seat.
When practitioners address measuring unit costs, it’s often in the context of Cloud Unit Economics. Our practitioners define Cloud Unit Economics as a system of profit maximization based on objective measurements of how well your organization is performing against not only its FinOps goals, but as a business overall. Cloud Unit Economics achieves these goals by leveraging the measurement of marginal cost (a.k.a., unit cost metrics) specific to the development and delivery of cloud-based software and marginal revenue (a.k.a., unit revenue metrics)."