Why FinOps vendors fear their own surveys
They publish the truth—then build tools to ignore it.
FinOps is supposed to mean accountability.
Dashboards that drove real decisions, alerts that stopped waste before it hit the CFO’s desk, and collaboration between finance and engineering that wasn’t just an off-site panel and a Slack emoji.
Instead? We got surveys.
Lots of them. Branded, bannered, beautifully useless.
The “State of FinOps” arrives like clockwork every quarter: a new coat of lipstick on the same pig. Visibility is still a mess. Tagging still breaks. Engineers still roll their eyes at the mention of cost optimization.
And vendors still pretend these insights are fresh.
Why? Because surveys are the industry’s favorite prop. They show you care without requiring you to change. They generate leads, not features. Concern, not commitment.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Surveys don’t close deals. Solutions do.
And if your product can’t answer for the findings in your own report? You’re not a vendor. You’re a PR firm with an API.
Why won’t vendors build from their own surveys
1. The results are embarrassing.
The same pain points show up year after year. You could Mad Lib the conclusions:
“85% of orgs struggle with cost attribution”
“Engineers lack context for spend decisions”
“Executives want better forecasting accuracy”
Change the year. Change the logo. The problem’s the same. If vendors built from that feedback, they’d be confessing to years of willful product neglect.
2. Surveys expose product failure in slow motion.
Every chart is a mirror. And most tools flinch. If your platform’s been out for half a decade and customers still can’t correlate usage with business value, guess what? That’s not “market maturity.” That’s feature bankruptcy.
3. Real pain doesn’t fit on a roadmap slide.
Want to fix tagging debt across a Fortune 100 org? Hope you brought a team of consultants and a bottle of whiskey. These aren’t features—they’re operational trench wars. No amount of pastel dashboard UI will fix broken internal accountability.
4. Acting on feedback means choosing a side.
Build for finance, engineers bail. Build for engineers, procurement panics. Most vendors try to please everyone, which means they serve no one. Real solutions require focus, and that means having the spine to say: “This tool isn’t for you.”
5. And the big fear? You might prove the value prop was always fake.
If you build exactly what the survey says is needed, and orgs still fail to optimize? You’ve just proven FinOps isn’t a tooling problem. It’s a culture, ownership, and alignment problem. That’s a hard sell when your ARR depends on convincing buyers that this tool is finally the one.
The real problem?
These surveys have become a form of compliance theater. Vendors churn them out like seasonal content drops—then go right back to selling slideware that ignores every insight they just published.
And we let them. Because hey, at least someone’s “raising awareness,” right?
No. That’s not awareness. That’s deflection.
So what should a FinOps survey be?
It should be a line in the sand. A playbook. A challenge.
A real FinOps survey would:
Name names. Which practices actually move the needle? Which tools get dropped after six months? Who’s bluffing?
Benchmark maturity by outcomes, not vanity metrics. Show cost savings per engineer, not how many dashboards got clicked.
Expose the gaps vendors won’t touch. Like the fact that most orgs have no idea who actually owns cloud cost accountability.
Map problems to product mandates. “72% can’t connect spend to value” should become “Here’s what we’re shipping next quarter.”
Open-source the feedback loop. Let users contribute failures, not just wins. Make it a community diagnostic—not a quarterly marketing stunt.
Until that happens, these surveys are just noise. A ritualized nod toward the truth—followed by another funding deck built on denial.
Surveys don’t close deals.
Solutions do.
And right now? Most FinOps vendors are solving for optics, not outcomes.
The bill keeps rising.
The trust keeps falling.
And the surveys keep printing.
Maybe next year, the report will finally say: “We’re building what you asked for.”
But I wouldn’t bet my cloud budget on it.