Duolingo has shared insights into its FinOps journey in a new post titled “What Every Engineer Should Know About FinOps”.
Duolingo outlines how they built financial awareness into engineering workflows, allowing developers to understand the cost impact of their work without disrupting delivery. By embedding financial awareness into its engineering workflows, developers can see the cost impact of their architectural and deployment choices in real time. By making FinOps a daily discipline, teams began to treat cost efficiency as a core part of engineering quality, alongside reliability, scalability, and performance. Engineers were encouraged to monitor the economic efficiency of their systems just as they would latency or uptime, ensuring that each change delivered measurable business value. The post highlights how this culture shift required close collaboration between engineering, data, and finance teams to turn abstract billing data into actionable insight.
To achieve this, Duolingo adopted metrics such as cost per active user and cost per feature, helping product teams weigh innovation against operational efficiency. “FinOps isn’t about saying ‘no’ to spending,” the blog noted, “it’s about ensuring every dollar drives maximum learning impact.” By tying cloud spend directly to product performance, engineers gained context to prioritise optimisations that offered both technical and financial benefits. The company’s FinOps efforts built confidence among stakeholders, who could now see how cost trends correlated with product growth and usage patterns.
A key enabler of this transformation was the use of internal dashboards powered by CloudZero’s cost intelligence platform and native AWS analytics tools. These dashboards visualise spend across microservices and environments, making it easier to identify hotspots and redundant resources. With this visibility, teams could balance workloads, optimise storage layers, and refine their use of compute instances. According to a case study from Spot.io, Duolingo achieved a 65% reduction in ECS costs through right-sizing and adopting spot instances, improving both resilience and cost predictability.
A similar story has emerged at Adaptavist, which saved $800,000 in AWS costs in 12 months. The company reported that the savings resulted from improved visibility into its cloud usage, enhanced tagging, and proactive monitoring of resource consumption. According to the blog, building a culture of cost awareness across teams was key to sustaining results and ensuring optimisations were driven by data rather than mandates.
Across the industry, the FinOps movement continues to gain momentum. Community debates on Reddit’s FinOps and DevOps forums, as well as the sessions at the FinOps X 2025 conference, which drew over 2,500 attendees, reflect how teams are shifting their focus from cost reduction to data-driven accountability. As one OpsLevel podcast discussion with Duolingo’s engineers noted, the future of FinOps lies in giving engineers context and control, not just constraints.
For organisations seeking to replicate Duolingo and Adaptavist’s success, the takeaway is consistent: make cloud costs visible, equip teams with actionable data, and foster a shared language between finance and engineering. When teams see cost efficiency as a marker of engineering excellence, financial optimisation becomes a natural outcome of building better systems rather than a separate goal.
