Here’s how the IT bypass works. Someone in the developer group needs a cluster of servers to do some testing. IT says it will be months before the request can even be considered. The developer says okay and signs up for Amazon Web Services with a credit card.

Then one weekend, the developer forgets to turn things off. He returns Monday with a bill for $5,000.

This happens all the time. Cloudability is a new startup going into public beta today. Company executives say its service can solve this cost problem.

Here’s how:

Sign up for an account with Cloudability and let them know what services you are using. Cloudability will monitor your accounts where you have submitted a credit card. For example, GitHub, MailChimp and Basecamp are among the 81 services that Cloudability supports.

Often, people will have dozens of accounts. Cloudability will monitor the accounts, let you know how much you have paid and notify, for example, when approaching your budget or go into overage. Customers receive a daily email, updating how much they have spent.

The idea: Cloudability is universally about cost. The service addresses the issue of cloud sprawl that is occurring as people bypass IT. Sometimes hundreds of accounts are discovered that were never known about. A company thinks there may be a few dozen cloud services accounts. But the totals are actually in the hundreds.

Cloudability is using a freemium model. You are not charged until you hit a $25,000 spend. After that, you are charged according to the amount you spend.

Services Angle

Cloudability is a service that companies really need. The total cloud market is estimated to be $210 billion by  2015. Cloudability sees its market as about $2 billion.

Cloudability will compete with the monitoring companies like CloudRows and Ylastic. For the larger enterprise market, EnStratus is considered a competitor.

Cloudability sees it integrating with SAP and services such as Expensify. That seems to be the big missing link right now. Cloudability can grow ad hoc but integrating into financial systems will give Cloudability an important niche role as people bypass IT and cloud services proliferate.