BlueArch.ioBlueArch is FinOps Best Practices as a Service for AWS — a self-hosted control plane that ties infrastructure to the business outcomes it powers. The name is short for Blueprint Architectures, which is what we set out to build in 2021: a marketplace of reusable application templates for the solution architects we'd spent years consulting for. The marketplace evolved. The blueprint mindset didn't.
These aren't marketing values. They're the constraints that decided what code got written, what features got cut, and what customers we said no to.
Your AWS account is the most sensitive system in your business. We don't think a FinOps vendor should ever hold a cross-account role with read-everything permissions. BlueArch runs in your VPC, on your hardware, under your IAM. No SaaS in the loop, no data egress, no surprises in a quarterly SOC report.
Our misconfiguration catalog lives in a public repo. Our tag schema is human-readable YAML. Our LLM context format is documented and stable. If we vanished tomorrow, your governance policies would keep working — because they're not locked inside our database.
A FinOps tool that an SRE won't run in their terminal is dead on arrival. A FinOps tool a CFO can't read on a Monday-morning email is dead on arrival twice. BlueArch ships both: a CLI engineers actually want to use, and a control plane FP&A can quote in a board deck.
We refuse to frame the cloud as a tax. The cloud is what your business runs on — every dollar of AWS spend should map to a product, a customer cohort, a revenue line, a strategic bet. The goal isn't to spend less. The goal is to spend with intent.
Joel and his cofounder spent years consulting for companies across the AWS ecosystem. Different industries, different stacks, but the same applications kept showing up — a dozen variations on the same five or six architectures. So in 2021 we launched Blueprint Architectures: a marketplace for full application templates, a tool library for the solution architects we used to be.
Full applications, it turned out, were too custom to package. But a year of service engagements made one job painfully clear: everyone needed help cutting cloud costs. We rebranded around the slogan "Cutting cloud costs with ML." Around the same time, we printed a run of shirts that read "Major Tom, this is cloud control" — to our knowledge, the first time a David Bowie lyric was attached to FinOps. Someone wore one to re:Invent. It stuck.
In 2022 we joined the FinOps Foundation; Joel gave a talk in Austin on the role of open-source software in FinOps. In 2023 we expanded beyond software into solutions — EDP and PPA insurance for AWS commitments. In 2025 we sponsored aws-news.com. The marketplace pivoted. The blueprints stayed.
We chose partners who've shipped cloud, FinOps, and developer-tools products at scale — not generalist capital looking for the next shiny thing.
Founder of Startup Haven, a Pacific Northwest community for B2B and infrastructure founders. Long-time operator-investor focused on technical product companies at the seed stage.
Early-stage venture firm specializing in pre-seed and seed B2B software investments at quantitative scale.
Angel investor with a background in enterprise technology leadership; backs developer-tools and cloud-infrastructure companies.
Angel investor focused on early-stage cloud, FinOps, and developer-productivity software.
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