PropertyGuru turns cloud cost chaos into engineering ownership

PropertyGuru adopted Attribute™ for its promise of 'FinOps without tagging.' Unlike traditional approaches dependent on tagging compliance, Attribute™ automatically mapped costs, including those from complex shared services, back to the consuming teams. Evaluation was fast and lightweight, with no tagging cleanups required. Attribute™'s lightweight sensors rolled out across EKS clusters and VMs with clear documentation. Within two weeks, PropertyGuru was surfacing actionable insights into data transfer patterns and compute utilization that previously took weeks or months to uncover.

PropertyGuru's FinOps practice was mostly reactive. Cost visibility was fragmented across multiple AWS organizations and GCP accounts, making it difficult to see a consolidated picture of spend. Budgeting was hard, and setting baselines for individual teams was harder. Costs spiked unexpectedly, particularly around data transfer between availability zones, and explaining these behaviors required hours of digging through flow logs every month. Underutilized infrastructure and zombie resources from deprecated services consumed budget invisibly until the invoice arrived. FinOps became a monthly post-mortem rather than a proactive capability.

PropertyGuru turned to Attribute™ to break the cycle. The platform's promise of 'FinOps without tagging' stood out immediately. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on tagging compliance, Attribute™ automatically mapped costs, including those from complex shared services, back to the teams consuming them. As the team put it: 'We immediately saw clear cost attribution for our complex shared services—the very thing we struggled with most. That initial aha moment showed us the value in days, not months.'

The evaluation process was fast and lightweight, requiring no lengthy setup or tagging cleanups. Deployment was equally straightforward. With clear documentation and Attribute™'s lightweight sensors rolled out across EKS clusters and VMs, the engineering team had the system running quickly. Within two weeks, PropertyGuru was surfacing actionable insights that had previously taken weeks or months to uncover. Early wins included opportunities to optimize data transfer patterns and improve compute utilization—two of the company's biggest sources of inefficiency.

One of the most tangible outcomes was the reduction in investigation time. Tasks that once required hours of combing through AWS logs now take just minutes in Attribute™. Engineers can create team-specific cost views on demand, eliminating repetitive manual reporting and enabling true self-service FinOps. As Balamurugan shared: 'What used to take hours of digging through AWS logs to decode a shared service bill now takes minutes in Attribute™. Creating team-specific views has eliminated repetitive manual work and enabled true self-service for our engineers.'

The biggest impact was cultural. For the first time, engineering teams could see exactly how their code and architectural choices affected cloud spend. This transparency fostered a 'you build it, you own it, you pay for it' ethos, shifting accountability away from finance and embedding it directly into engineering workflows. Cost management evolved from a central finance problem into a shared engineering responsibility, with Attribute™ providing the visibility to make ownership real.

Attribute™ cracked one of PropertyGuru's toughest challenges: shared services attribution. Instead of treating shared resources as an opaque black box, the platform intelligently maps costs from databases, clusters, and other common services back to the microservices that consume them. Building on this success, PropertyGuru plans to expand Attribute™'s use beyond engineering so finance and product leaders can answer questions like 'What's the true cost of this feature?'—linking cloud spend to business context and guiding strategy.