You have a board meeting next week. Someone is going to ask about infrastructure costs. You know this because they ask every time.
Last quarter, you pulled numbers from AWS, cross-referenced with your OpenAI dashboard, dropped them into a spreadsheet, and tried to explain why costs went up 20%. It took three hours to prepare and five minutes to present. The board nodded politely and moved on.
There's a better way.
What the Board Actually Wants
Board members don't want a cloud cost dashboard. They don't want to see line items for every AWS service. They don't care about your DynamoDB read capacity units.
They want answers to three questions:
- Are we on budget? How does actual spend compare to what we planned?
- Where is the money going? What are the major cost categories?
- What's changing? What's different from last quarter, and why?
That's it. Everything else is noise in a board context.
The One-Slide Framework
The best infra report for a board fits on one slide. Here's the structure:
Top section: The headline number.
- Total infrastructure spend this quarter: $X
- Budget: $Y
- Variance: +/- Z%
Use green for under budget, amber for 0-10% over, red for 10%+ over. The board should understand your cost health in two seconds.
Middle section: The breakdown.
Show three to five categories, not thirty AWS services. Good categories:
- Cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure compute, storage, networking)
- AI/ML APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, model hosting)
- SaaS tooling (monitoring, CI/CD, third-party services)
- Data infrastructure (warehousing, analytics, ETL)
For each category: this quarter's spend, last quarter's spend, and the percentage change. That's three numbers per row.
Bottom section: The narrative.
Two to three bullets explaining what changed and why:
- "AI API costs increased 35% due to the launch of the AI assistant feature in March."
- "Cloud compute decreased 8% after migrating from EC2 to Fargate."
- "On track to stay within annual infrastructure budget."
Building the Report Without Pain
The hard part isn't the slide. It's getting the numbers. Most CTOs spend hours pulling data from multiple dashboards, reconciling invoices, and building spreadsheets.
Reduce this to a process:
1. Centralize your cost data. Get all providers — AWS, GCP, OpenAI, Anthropic — into one view. Whether it's a tool, a spreadsheet, or a script that pulls from APIs, you need a single source of truth.
2. Define your categories once. Map every cost line to one of your three-to-five board categories. This mapping doesn't change often. Do it once, and updates become automatic.
3. Automate the quarterly pull. Write a query, build a template, or use a tool that generates the numbers automatically. The first time takes effort. Every subsequent quarter takes minutes.
4. Write the narrative fresh each quarter. The numbers are mechanical. The narrative requires judgment. Spend your time here — explaining what changed and what you're doing about it.
Common Mistakes
Too much detail. If your board slide has more than five line items, it has too many. Roll up services into categories. Nobody in the boardroom needs to know what CloudFront costs.
No comparison. Absolute numbers are meaningless without context. "$45,000 on cloud" means nothing. "$45,000 on cloud, up 12% from last quarter due to customer growth" tells a story.
No forward look. The board wants to know where you're going, not just where you've been. Add one line: "Forecasted Q3 spend: $X, based on current growth rate." It shows you're thinking ahead.
Defensive framing. Don't apologize for cost increases that come from growth. "Infrastructure costs increased 20% because revenue increased 25%" is a good story. Frame costs relative to the business, not in isolation.
The Ratio the Board Loves
If you present one metric beyond the headline number, make it infrastructure cost as a percentage of revenue. (Or as a percentage of ARR, or gross margin — whatever your board tracks.)
This ratio tells the board whether your infrastructure is scaling efficiently:
- Ratio decreasing: Costs growing slower than revenue. Good.
- Ratio flat: Costs growing at the same rate as revenue. Normal for early stage.
- Ratio increasing: Costs growing faster than revenue. Needs explanation.
A CTO who says "our infra cost ratio dropped from 18% to 15% of revenue this quarter" gets a very different reaction than one who says "our AWS bill went up 20%."
The Process, Not the Slide
The slide is the output. The process is the value. A CTO who can pull accurate, categorized infrastructure costs in minutes — not hours — has visibility that compounds every quarter.
You'll catch budget issues earlier. You'll explain variances with confidence. You'll forecast with data instead of gut feel. And you'll spend five minutes preparing for the board question instead of three hours.
That starts with knowing your numbers daily, not just quarterly. If you're scrambling to build a report the week before a board meeting, you don't have a reporting problem. You have a visibility problem.
Get started: Connect your providers to StackSpend for centralized cloud and AI cost visibility.