The world’s first Application Cost Engineering platform curbs inflating costs associated with AI and cloud services at the source code - without slowing down engineers.
Frugal AI, the company turning inefficient code into cloud savings, today announced a $5 million seed round led by Whitecap Venture Partners with participation from Mistral Venture Partners, as well as the founders of Snyk and CloudCheckr. Frugal was founded by repeat entrepreneurs Mike Weider, Craig Conboy and Rob Calendino.
Frugal is the world’s first Application Cost Engineering (ACE) platform, designed to help developers and FinOps teams rein in ballooning cloud managed service and AI bills before they hit production. With spending approaching $1T, benchmark studies show most tech companies are spending over 10% of top line revenue on cloud costs. New investments in AI are driving up growth rates to unsustainable levels.
“Cloud and AI costs are quietly eroding software margins,” said Mike Weider, CEO and co-founder of Frugal. “Our first-of-its-kind solution for automating code efficiency will deliver much needed savings without slowing development.”
“Building cost control into the development process makes far more sense than waiting for things to spiral out of control. This is a massive market and we’re excited to help the team bring their vision to life.” said Russell Samuels, Partner at Whitecap Venture Partners.
Introducing Frugal Code: a developer-first cost optimization platform with three core innovations:
- Cost-to-Code - Breaks down cloud and AI costs to the application, service, function, and line-of-code level.
- Frugal Fixes – Monitors production apps, identifies cost inefficiencies, and writes code-level optimizations with quantified savings.
- Frugalbot – a conversational assistant for developers to query costs at the line-of-code level and visualize inefficiencies across their stack. Frugalbot also integrates with Github and AI coding agents to provide cost guardrails and expertise everywhere developers work.
Availability
Frugal Code is available today in Tech Preview with commercial launch planned for Q1 2026. Early access is open now at www.frugal.co. Initial support includes AWS, GCP, Datadog, New Relic, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Azure and other services coming soon.
About Frugal AI
Frugal AI is the pioneer of Application Cost Engineering (ACE), the next evolution of FinOps in the age of AI and Cloud. The company’s platform helps development teams optimize application code to reduce cloud costs without slowing development. By analyzing source code alongside observability data and cloud bills, Frugal automatically detects expensive application patterns and generates quality-assured pull requests that deliver real savings. Unlike traditional cost tools that focus on infrastructure rightsizing, Frugal fixes the code itself, reducing consumption of high-cost services like AI, caching, and databases. For more information, see https://frugal.co.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251112458698/en/
“Our first-of-its-kind solution for automating code efficiency will deliver much needed savings without slowing development.”
Contacts
PR & Media Contact
mediateam@frugal.co