How Dailymotion made cloud & LLM cost a question anyone can ask
- Industry
- Technology
- Company Size
- 201-1000
- Departments
- EngineeringFinance
From the engineer investigating a cost spike to the executive preparing a board review, cloud and LLM cost answers flow through Dust, powered by Costory.
"I want my engineers to think about cloud and LLM cost without slowing down. Costory lives in Dust, where my teams already work."
— David Ramblewski, CTO, Dailymotion
The challenge: costs that belonged to everyone, and no one
Dailymotion runs one of the world's largest video platforms on multi-cloud infrastructure, with costs spanning AWS, GCP and Datadog. As AI-driven features ramp up, that bill grows. Cloud and LLM cost is the company's #2 expense line, and historically its least understood one.
"Every time someone had a question on infra cost, it was on me."
— Raphaël Messner, VP Core Media and Operations, Dailymotion
Cost knowledge was concentrated in a handful of people. Most of it never left the FinOps tool: the data existed, but it was invisible to the engineers and executives who needed it daily. Variances accumulated and surfaced at quarter end, too late to act.
How it works
Dust is the AI platform where Dailymotion's teams already work: the single interface used for questions, workflows, and decisions across the company. Costory is Dailymotion's infrastructure cost brain: it knows who owns what, what changed, and what every variance means for the budget.
By connecting Costory to Dust, that intelligence became available to everyone, in plain language, from wherever they work. Because Dust already holds Dailymotion's company documentation and internal knowledge, cost answers come back in full context: cross-referenced with product decisions, team structure, and business history. That is what a raw API integration cannot do. Ask a cost question, get Costory's answer grounded in everything Dust already knows, without opening a new tool or pinging a specialist.
Today, a dozen people, from engineers to executives, access cost data weekly through Dust.
One layer, three conversations
Raphaël Messner. The budget, finally under control
Raphaël Messner is VP Core Media and Operations at Dailymotion, reporting to the CTO. He has financial ownership of the cloud infrastructure and is the go-to person for cost questions across the company: budget reviews, variance investigations, provider renegotiations.
Before Costory, getting a reliable number meant a full day of manual assembly: provider exports, internal tools, manual reconciliation, and only then could the analysis start. Now Raphaël types the question in Dust. A variance explained, a breakdown by team, a figure ready for a provider negotiation. What used to take a full day takes a single conversation.
Last year, for the first time, Dailymotion closed the year within its expected cloud budget.
"My cloud budget is under control. We know where we drifted and why."
— Raphaël Messner, VP Core Media and Operations, Dailymotion
David Ramblewski. Cost awareness, built into the workflow
When David Ramblewski joined Dailymotion as CTO, he set himself a goal from day one: build financial awareness into his engineering teams' daily work, without forcing them into a separate tool or slowing velocity.
The starting point was unit economics. Engineering's unit economics used to live in a 37-tab Excel file, and using it required an Excel black belt with solid finance skills. David wanted that financial intelligence decentralized, accessible far beyond the few people able to operate the spreadsheet. Costory replaced the brain of that spreadsheet with something simple, visual and powerful: connected to every provider Dailymotion works with, it maintains a reliable, living, consolidated view of the company's unit economics. Dust handled the decentralization, making that intelligence available to anyone at Dailymotion in plain language.
From those unit economics, the team derived total cost of ownership. How much does an ad impression cost? A million CDN requests? What share of storage and network does each product consume? TCO turned cost data into margin conversations: Dailymotion now understands and optimizes the profitability of each of its product verticals.
Day to day, that awareness matters most in two moments:
- When someone asks whether a feature is pulling its weight. Features get built and left running. Without easy cost attribution, the habit of checking never forms. A service can cost hundreds of thousands a year and generate almost nothing, not because the original decision was wrong, but because nobody measured it after launch. Now an engineer types the question into Dust and gets the answer back, no specialist required.
- When an incident hits. When an attacker drives a cost spike, anyone on the team can ask Dust what it has cost so far. Engineering and finance reach the same figure, without coordination overhead.
That is what David calls a culture of ROI: cost awareness as a natural part of how engineers work, not a separate exercise. No tech for tech's sake: engineers now factor cost into their day-to-day decisions, what to build, how to size it, whether it pays for itself, without losing velocity. Dailymotion's engineers receive a weekly Slack digest and can go deeper on any line directly in Dust.
"I set this goal on day one: build financial awareness into the daily work of my engineering teams. Today they factor cost into every decision without losing an ounce of velocity. And the day my teams no longer need me on a topic, I know the culture has taken hold."
— David Ramblewski, CTO, Dailymotion
The C-suite. A direct line to the numbers
When cloud and LLM cost is the #2 expense line, every executive has a stake. At Dailymotion, the C-suite gets their answers through Dust, in the same interface they already use for everything else.
Guillaume Clément, Dailymotion's CEO, types his question in plain language. The answer comes back structured, sourced, ready for a board slide or a provider call. No round-trip to engineering, no two-day wait.
Dust isn't just a productivity tool at Dailymotion. It's the C-suite's direct line to operational reality.
"Cloud and LLM cost is strategic, not just operational. With Dust and Costory, we own and drive that conversation directly: with providers, with the board, with my team."
— Guillaume Clément, CEO, Dailymotion
Why it works
Three different people, three different workflows, three different decisions. What they share is the same interface: Dust, connected to Costory through a single integration.
This is what Dust makes possible: take specialized intelligence sitting inside an expert tool, connect it to Dust, and it becomes available to every team in plain language, without rebuilding anything per use case. At Dailymotion, that intelligence is cloud cost. The pattern works for any domain.
Beyond cloud
Dailymotion's next priority: automated reports generated by Dust, crossing financial data with company context, delivered to every cost owner without anyone having to ask. Cost intelligence as a push, not a pull.
The bigger picture is that this problem will only get harder. Three forces are converging at once.
- First, agentic AI is now writing and shipping code autonomously. The gap between a product decision and its cost impact is collapsing from weeks to hours. Most engineering teams have no visibility into what their agents are spending, and the bill arrives before anyone understood what triggered it.
- Second, the number of infrastructure providers keeps growing: new GPU clouds, specialized AI inference layers, edge providers. Each one adds a new cost surface that procurement has not caught up with yet.
- Third, SaaS vendors are retiring flat annual licenses in favor of consumption-based pricing, usage tiers, and metered APIs. The same unpredictability that took a decade to tame in cloud infrastructure is now spreading to the entire software stack, faster.
The companies that make that complexity legible to everyone, not just a specialist, will have a structural advantage. That is what Dailymotion built with Dust and Costory.
Interested in learning more about how Dust can help your team? Visit our solutions page or reach out to our sales team.
