Meet CostPerform
CostPerform is a leading enterprise software platform that helps large organizations understand their cost structures and business drivers behind them. Where most finance tools stop at reporting what was spent, CostPerform answers the harder questions: why costs land where they do, and how overhead and indirect costs should be attributed to specific products, services, customers, and segments.
The platform combines flexible cost modeling (reusable templates and detailed models built from layers, objects, and allocations), multidimensional allocation across dimensions like geography, product line, and sales channel, built-in ETL for importing and transforming data from CSV, Excel, SQL, and web services, and scenario analysis for testing “what-if” decisions. A decentralized web portal handles data entry, progress tracking, and now, embedded analytics, so teams across the organization can contribute directly.
IT Finance View Dashboard.
The Buy-vs-Build Decision
Before embedding Reveal, CostPerform relied on an internally built dashboarding solution. On paper it met the reporting requirement; in practice, adoption was very low. For many customers, the dashboards were something they expected to exist when they bought the software, rather than a feature they actively used or valued.
The customers who did try them often couldn’t get the outcomes they wanted. The tool lacked the flexibility and usability needed for advanced or customized analytics, and many users quietly stopped. That created a frustrating feedback loop: low engagement produced little meaningful feedback, which made it hard to know which capabilities mattered and harder still to justify continued internal development.
The cost of standing still was mounting on two fronts. Customers increasingly expected modern, interactive analytics the home-grown tool couldn’t match, and engineering time kept going toward a framework that had very little value.
Choosing Reveal: Secure by Design, Decided by Developers
CostPerform first looked at Microsoft Power BI but ruled it out because CostPerform operates in highly secure deployments that can be completely disconnected from the internet and external services. That narrowed the search to a fully embeddable, white-label analytics platform that could run entirely within those constraints.
Rather than make a quick pick, the CostPerform team ran a structured evaluation. The shortlist included continuing with their own in-house solution, or choosing Reveal, Sisense, or an open-source alternative. Crucially, the team built proof-of-concept implementations and put the decision largely in the hands of the developers who would live with it, weighing each option’s SDK, integration experience, flexibility, and long-term maintainability.
Reveal won on balance, offering the strongest combination of developer experience, embedded analytics depth, white-label flexibility, and a roadmap full of capabilities the team genuinely wanted — much of which covered features CostPerform had still been planning to build itself.
Our platform runs in highly secure deployments that can be completely disconnected from the internet. Reveal was one of the few solutions that could deliver a modern, fully white-labeled analytics experience inside those constraints.
Jelmer de JongProduct Owner, CostPerform
From Proof of Concept to Production
The proof of concept was up and running within hours, validating Reveal’s capabilities and demonstrating value internally almost immediately. Full production deployment took just a couple of months — most of it spent not on Reveal, but on integrating it cleanly into CostPerform’s architecture and meeting strict security standards.
To deliver a consistent experience, the seven-person product team built additional functionality around the Reveal SDK, including a dashboard page-management framework that gives CostPerform a uniform structure for analytics pages. Because Reveal provides the analytics components rather than a full-page system, this framework was where the team shaped the exact user experience they wanted.
Most Reveal functionality worked out of the box, letting the team focus on integration rather than building analytics from scratch. The challenges that did surface were specific and solvable: SQL Server integration and a strict Content Security Policy (CSP) that initially blocked certain Reveal features. Once CostPerform traced the issue to CSP restrictions, it worked closely with the Reveal team to resolve the conflicts.
Even so, the effort was a fraction of the alternative: the team estimated that building comparable analytics internally would have taken roughly two more years.
The proof of concept was running within hours, and most functionality worked out of the box. We estimated it would have taken nearly two years of development to build what Reveal gave us, so we put that time back into our core expertise: cost modeling.
2 yrs
development saved vs. building it in-house
Hours
to a working proof of concept
7-person
product team delivered it
1 flat
predictable price
What Customers Build with Insights
Inside the CostPerform Portal, Reveal is embedded as a white-labeled module the company calls “Insights,” running entirely within the customer’s secure environment. Through it, users create, customize, and share dashboards, monitor KPIs, analyze variances, and build their own reports using self-service analytics with the focus on presenting cost-model results in a way a broad audience can understand and act on.
The most active users today are the cost modelers and finance professionals who build, validate, and maintain the models. As adoption expands, Insights is increasingly reaching department managers, operations managers, and business-unit leaders who consume cost information and feed operational data back into the models, broadening access beyond a small group of specialists, a core objective of the strategy.
Cost-allocation validation, cost-model analysis, and profitability analysis matter most, because they reveal how costs flow through the business and land on products, services, customers, and segments. Common metrics include actual-versus-budget comparisons, cost per product or segment, margins, and revenue-versus-cost relationships.
Customers use these dashboards to flag business units with unexpected cost increases, compare performance across segments, evaluate profitability, validate allocation results, and ground budgeting in transparent data. Because the model is self-service and dashboards are easy to share, teams align around a single, common view of performance instead of waiting on finance or IT.
Results and Business Impact
The single biggest impact of Reveal has been speed — delivering advanced, mature analytics to customers far faster than CostPerform could have built alone.
Insights had already helped CostPerform win deals before the Reveal implementation. Reveal strengthened that by making the analytics environment richer, more intuitive, and highly configurable. Insights that were once consumed mainly by the specialists who built the models are now available to managers, business-unit leaders, and finance professionals through interactive dashboards they can use to understand, validate, and act on results.
Automation of Breadth Dashboard.
Since implementing Reveal, we have been able to provide customers with significantly more powerful self-service analytics and dashboards while dramatically reducing the amount of custom dashboard development and maintenance work required internally. The platform enabled us to move away from continuously rebuilding analytics features ourselves and instead focus on delivering business value to customers.
The Build-vs-Buy Takeaway
If there’s one thing CostPerform wants other software teams to take from this case study, it’s the value of the buy-versus-build decision. Rather than rebuild analytics the company would only ever be average at, CostPerform partnered with a platform purpose-built for embedding and pointed its own talent at the cost-modeling problems only it can solve.
The result is Insights: a fully white-labeled, security-compliant analytics module that turns complex cost models into business intelligence a whole organization can use, delivered in a fraction of the time, at one predictable price, with a roadmap the team is excited to grow into.
Reveal gave us the best balance of developer experience, white-label flexibility, and embedded analytics capability with a straightforward, predictable price instead of a complex usage-based model.
