When we founded Signal Vine, an AI-powered messaging platform, we were early believers in the promise of the cloud. It gave us the ability to scale fast, reach customers instantly, and focus our engineering talent on building software not racking servers. We loved the flexibility. We embraced the freedom. But over time, we realized something critical was missing:
We couldn’t see what was actually going on.
Costs would spike without warning. A misconfiguration would bring production to a halt. Someone would spin up a test environment… and forget to shut it down. Our DevOps team was working overtime, and yet, when it came time to explain what we were spending and why we didn’t have good answers.
And that’s where the idea for OpsCanvas began.
Day One: The Cloud Was Empowering But Opaque
From the outset, the cloud gave us leverage. We didn’t need a massive IT footprint to run our SaaS platform. We could hire developers anywhere. We could deploy quickly. But managing infrastructure was never truly “easy.” We hired a DevOps engineer as one of our first three or four engineering hires not to ship features, but to help us keep things running.
Even then, the day-to-day was a balancing act: how do we move fast and stay reliable, without the overhead of a huge operations team?
It’s also where I met Jason Turim, who would go on to become our co-founder and CTO at OpsCanvas. Jason was an experienced engineering leader who, like me, was constantly navigating that middle ground between development speed and operational sanity. We were on the same wavelength: the cloud was incredible but we were spending way too much time trying to understand what it was doing.
The Mistakes That Sparked the Realization
Over time, the lack of visibility started to bite us. There was the time a DevOps engineer accidentally overwrote our production database. That took days to recover from. Another time, we nearly lost customer trust when a junior engineer left a configuration open and a crypto miner used our cloud account to rack up $15,000 in overnight compute spend.
Then there were the dozens of smaller, everyday headaches: a cloud bill that doubled after we added Elasticsearch, but no clear answer as to why. Environments spun up for demos and forgotten. Infrastructure “ghosts” draining budget without adding value.
And every time our board or CFO asked, “Why did costs go up?” I’d turn to the engineering team and they’d have to pause their work and go hunting through logs and usage data. Sometimes there was an answer. Often, there wasn’t just one. We were playing detective, every time.
A Familiar Story for Every Cloud-Based Company
At first, we thought we were doing something wrong. But once we sold Signal Vine and started talking to other tech leaders CTOs, CEOs, DevOps managers we realized this wasn’t just our problem. This was everyone’s problem.
We’d all bought into the cloud promise: move fast, scale easily, only pay for what you use. But what we didn’t get was the visibility to manage that usage intelligently.
What we heard again and again were stories of:
- Surprise bills with no clear cause
- Shadow infrastructure running quietly in the background
- Burned-out DevOps engineers doing heroic work to hold it all together
- CFOs and CTOs having to justify expenses they barely understood
We weren’t alone. We were part of a much bigger issue.
From Problem to Platform: Why We Built OpsCanvas
After exiting Signal Vine, Jason and I asked ourselves a question:
If we could build one company that solved a painful, universal problem, what would it be?
The answer was clear: we would solve the gaps we experienced in the cloud: visibility, cost control, efficiency, and the list goes on. All of these problems which seemed interrelated and from our perspective largely unsolved.
Not by adding another billing tool. Not by creating yet another dashboard with raw data and alerts. But by shifting how companies think about infrastructure.
With OpsCanvas, we help teams see their cloud not in terms of raw resources like databases, EC2 instances, and managed services, but in terms of applications and the environments where they’re running. We translate infrastructure into business context.
- What’s running?
- Why is it running?
- Who needs it?
- How much is it costing?
- When can it stop?
That’s what leaders really need to know.
We built OpsCanvas to make those answers easy to get. Whether you’re a CTO trying to optimize usage, a VP of Engineering trying to reduce toil, or a CFO trying to reconcile bills with business impact, OpsCanvas gives you clarity and control.
The Cloud Isn’t Broken It Just Needs a Lens
We still believe in the cloud. The market is massive (over $600 billion and growing), and the innovation it enables is staggering. But no one’s ever said: “I feel really good about our cloud spend” or “I understand our cloud usage perfectly.”
That’s because most organizations don’t have tools that connect the technical infrastructure with the business layer. They’ve got usage graphs but no way to say “this is tied to our dev environment for Application X” or “this spend supports our production API traffic.”
And when there’s a spike in cost or a deployment gone wrong, the first question is: “Who messed up?”
But often, no one did anything obviously wrong. Someone just forgot to shut something off. Or a new deployment used a resource with a default configuration that turned out to be wildly overprovisioned.
This disconnect leads to frustration across the org from engineering to finance to leadership. Our goal with OpsCanvas is to bring everyone onto the same page.
Helping Engineers, Executives, and Everyone in Between
One thing we’re proud of is that OpsCanvas isn’t just about cost savings (although we help a lot there). It’s about empowerment.
- Engineers get tools that speed up their workloads and prevent accidental overspend.
- DevOps teams can access automation to reduce the mundane tasks and prevent deployment errors, as well as tools to control how long resources run.
- Product leaders get real-time insight into how much each environment is costing and whether it’s still needed.
- Executives get answers they can use to explain decisions to boards, investors, and partners.
We’re removing the guesswork from managing cloud software. We’re turning black boxes into transparent systems. And we’re making the cloud something teams can all engage without needing translation or advanced skills.
Where We’re Headed
As we continue to grow OpsCanvas, we’re focused on building not just a product, but a platform that truly redefines cloud visibility.
We believe:
- The future of cloud management is proactive, not reactive.
- Visibility shouldn’t require manual digging or detective work.
- The best DevOps tools empower the whole business.
The cloud should be powerful and understandable. Flexible and manageable. With OpsCanvas, we’re helping teams make that vision real.👋 Want to hear how this vision started from the engineering side? Read our CTO Jason Turim’s story and the tech-driven motivation behind OpsCanvas.