About Allium

Allium is a blockchain data infrastructure company that enables organizations to seamlessly ingest, transform, and analyze data across multiple blockchains. Trusted by leading companies like Visa, Stripe, and Phantom Wallet, Allium provides the foundation for scalable, reliable, and real-time blockchain data operations.

The Challenge

Allium manages a complex stack spanning cloud services, data warehouses, and dozens of blockchain-specific providers, making cost tracking a constant challenge.

Prior to Vantage, the team relied on manual processes, pulling data into internal notebooks via APIs and tagging expenses manually. This took valuable time away from software engineers on the team and made even basic reporting, like separating cost of goods sold (COGS) from research & development (R&D), cumbersome. On top of that, inconsistent tagging left cost attribution uneven across teams and customers.

With millions of dollars in annual cloud spend, these inefficiencies turned cost tracking into a time-consuming and unreliable process. These inefficiencies created ongoing pain for board reporting, financial forecasting, and ultimately pushed Allium to evaluate cloud cost management tools that could provide real-time, accurate visibility across their infrastructure.

Why Vantage

Allium evaluated other FinOps tools but found they couldn’t keep up with the complexity of its infrastructure. With more than 20 custom providers in use—including Google Cloud, AWS, Snowflake, and blockchain RPC services—the other platforms lacked the ability to ingest and unify costs from the sources, leaving large portions of their infrastructure unaccounted for.

Vantage stood out by offering full coverage across providers, with support for custom providers, and updated, real-time cost data, giving Allium the ability to track the entirety of their spend with the granularity they needed. Virtual tags further helped the team normalize inconsistent tagging and reliably separate costs between COGS and R&D without waiting on backend changes.

Vantage’s support for Snowflake query tag parsing also allowed for extremely granular cost accounting that other providers fell short on. This combination of comprehensive coverage, real-time visibility, and flexibility gave Allium confidence that Vantage could grow with their business and adapt as new needs arise.

Support for Custom Providers

With Vantage's custom provider support, Allium now has complete cost visibility across their entire infrastructure stack in a single platform. All 20+ of their specialized blockchain providers—from standard cloud services to niche RPC providers—are tracked automatically.

The comprehensive coverage means no more blind spots in infrastructure spending. Every dollar flowing through their complex tech stack is visible, categorized, and ready for analysis.

Virtual Tagging

The biggest business impact came from Vantage’s virtual tagging capabilities. Allium can now create and update tags directly in the Vantage UI, without heavy engineering changes, allowing the team to attribute spend to services, teams, or environments. This gives them clean slices of data, such as the view of COGS vs. R&D, to drive more accurate reporting and decision-making.

Unlike traditional tagging, which requires backend work, virtual tags are applied instantly across providers and accounts. Remarkably, the team had most of their virtual tags configured before the agreement was even signed, enabling finance and leadership to get accurate reporting almost immediately.

Near Real-Time Data Enables Proactive Cost Management

Vantage now provides near real-time cost visibility that transformed Allium’s ability to proactively manage spend. The team is now alerted to anomalies as they happen and respond immediately, rather than uncovering issues days later.

This real-time capability is particularly valuable for their Snowflake usage, where query tag JSON parsing provides granular visibility into warehouse-level spending and customer-specific costs. With their largest cost center now transparent down to individual queries, Allium can optimize usage patterns and attribute costs with precision.

Fast Onboarding Delivers Immediate Value

Allium achieved a remarkably fast time-to-value with Vantage. By the time they were finishing their trial and closing the deal, the team was already mostly out of onboarding and actively using the platform's core features. "By the time we started onboarding, we were almost fully operational on the platform, with only a couple of specific Snowflake questions left to resolve," noted Cheng Han Lee, Co-Founder and CTO at Allium.

Today, Allium has the majority of their company onboarded and using Vantage. This adoption underscores the strategic importance of cost visibility to Allium’s leadership and the ease-of-use of Vantage, allowing executives and engineers alike to gain immediate value.