About Rippling

Rippling is a workforce management platform that gives businesses one place to run HR, Payroll, IT, and Spend, globally. Built on a single source of truth for employee data and integrated with 500+ apps, Rippling allows businesses to execute more efficiently. Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.8B from the top investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, and Bedrock.

The Challenge

Rippling is one of the fastest-growing software companies in the world, serving more than 20,000 customers globally, surpassing $1B in annual recurring revenue, and operating one of the most ambitious engineering organizations in SaaS. Its engineering team comprises more than 1,000 engineers across 200 teams, all building and maintaining multiple products in parallel that interoperate as a single system.

Rippling's infrastructure has grown to match that scale. The platform spans AWS, MongoDB, Datadog, and a growing set of AI providers, with costs allocated across more than 30 dimensions including domain and product area, all maintained in alignment with Finance expectations. Every dollar of spend must map cleanly to a single owning team under the team's MECE discipline (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive). A fixed materiality threshold applies across thousands of budgets, regardless of a team's relative spend, and overages are escalated by severity tier and resolved with the urgency of a production incident.

Running a FinOps function with this complexity and rigor is highly dependent on the cloud cost management platform that supports it. Rippling's team needs a system that ingests the messy realities of native billing APIs, supports rigorous weekly, monthly, and quarterly budget cadences, enables fast iteration on allocation logic without forcing every change through Terraform, and exposes an API surface robust enough to bridge cost data with the workflows Finance already runs. At Rippling, the FinOps function is mission-critical to how the business runs. Finance, R&D, and Leadership all depend on it to keep the company on plan and on margin.

Why Vantage

Vantage is the foundation of Rippling's FinOps operating model, unifying allocation, budget governance, accountability, and visibility across hundreds of teams and a multi-vendor cloud and infrastructure stack. The platform absorbs the AWS billing API's idiosyncrasies natively and supports Virtual Tags through the UI when Terraform is too slow to keep up, letting teams define and update cost allocation tags directly. It also exposes the API surface Rippling's custom automation depends on and provides Cost Reports the team can actually drill into mid-investigation.

Vantage is a centerpiece of our FinOps story, and we use most of its key features to drive compliance with our budgets.

Just as important is how Vantage adapts to the way Rippling works. Vaibhav describes the platform as "just flexible enough" and notably "not super bloated." At Rippling's scale, that calibration is what makes Vantage the right partner: the FinOps team leverages the platform's depth without it becoming a maintenance burden, while Vantage's value extends across Finance, Engineering, and Leadership through automation and integration. In practice, that comes through in the Vantage capabilities Rippling has built its FinOps practice around.

Virtual Tags for Allocation, Reporting, and Accountability

Virtual Tags anchor how Rippling holds engineering teams accountable for their share of cloud spend. They map native cloud tags into a clean allocation structure without requiring teams to re-tag resources at the source. Cost data from AWS, MongoDB, and other infrastructure providers flows into Vantage, where the FinOps team uses Virtual Tags to assign every dollar to a specific team, product, or domain. Iteration happens through the Vantage UI rather than Terraform, keeping the system responsive as the organization evolves.

A catch-all rule at the bottom of every Virtual Tag stack maps all spend to its underlying provider, with team-level cuts layered above. This guarantees no spend escapes allocation, preserving MECE even as teams, products, and providers shift.

On top of that base, Rippling maintains two parallel Virtual Tag hierarchies for distinct allocation lenses:

• Financial reporting (COR / COGS vs. R&D): maps infrastructure spend against the company's financial reporting framework
• Team-level accountability: assigns cloud spend to specific engineering teams and the budgets they own

Together, these hierarchies let the Rippling FinOps team iterate quickly, audit cleanly, and scale Virtual Tag governance across providers without losing the line of accountability MECE requires.

Budget Discipline Treated Like a P1 Incident

Rippling enforces budget governance with the same rigor it applies to production reliability. Every team's budget is sized through an Annual Operating Plan (AOP)/Latest Estimate (LE) planning process where Engineering VPs sign off on growth rates in partnership with the Finance organization. A fixed materiality threshold applies across all budgets, and overages escalate by severity tier, with the highest treated like a site outage.

We treat this like an incident, just like the site went down. We get people in a room and get them to resolve the budget overage. Strictness is really the key here.

A weekly bot pulls every MECE budget from Vantage via the API, runs Rippling's cost prediction and projection logic, and posts alerts when any team is tracking over budget.

API and Audit Logs for Custom Automation and Change Visibility

Vantage's API is the bridge between cost data and the rest of Rippling's operating system. The FinOps team has built custom automation on top of it, including the weekly budget bot and a script that integrates Finance's planning data into Vantage on a regular cadence. Audit Logs underpin all of it, giving the team a forensic record of every change to budgets, Virtual Tags, and Cost Reports. Without that visibility, every change would have to be gated behind Terraform or a custom scripting layer, slowing iteration and erasing the agility that makes Vantage workable at this scale.

Single-Pane Visibility Across Cloud, SaaS, and AI Spend

Vantage gives Rippling a single pane of glass for cost visibility across AWS, MongoDB, and a growing roster of AI providers. Finance and Engineering work from the same normalized view, with Vantage as the system of record across the stack.

AI is a new and rapidly evolving category in this view, with billing models and token costs changing week to week. Custom dashboards layered on top of Vantage handle prompt- and team-level analysis, while Vantage stays the source of truth for AI spend as a financial line item across providers like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Vaibhav's stance on AI is direct: it is "still money and it still needs to be tracked like anything else."

The Business Impact

Vantage is core to how Rippling protects margin, sustains growth, and holds engineering accountable for the infrastructure it ships.

Ultimately, Vantage helps us stay within budget, and that means maintaining our margin and making sure our growth is strong.

Finance, Engineering, and Leadership all run on the same numbers in Vantage, with planning, alerts, and accountability flowing through a single system. Rippling treats the platform as the foundation of its FinOps practice, building discipline and automation on top of it rather than treating it as a reactive dashboard.

Looking Forward

As Rippling scales, the FinOps team plans to deepen its investment in resource modeling and Virtual Tags, what Vaibhav calls Rippling's "biggest lever with Vantage."

AI cost tracking will mature alongside vendor billing models and usage patterns. As one of Vantage's most active design partners, Rippling will continue to shape the roadmap through direct collaboration with the Vantage team.