Is "cloud cost per unit of business” just a SaaS thing?

I recently joined CloudZero to bring cloud cost to engineering teams - both as a way to unleash innovation, and as a new non-functional requirement that developers need to own. This is not about cost optimization - there are plenty of others who can help teams maximize the benefit they get from reserved instances or savings plans, for example. This is about seeing cost as an element of good software - just like performance, quality, reliability, or security. 

Most of our customers are other software companies; SaaS providers who operate at scale in the cloud. For them, cloud cost is a key element of COGS. Much has been written about how successful SaaS companies leverage deep understanding of cost for strategic benefit. The most common is cost per tenant; how much does it cost me to deliver my service per month per subscriber? Armed with that knowledge, one can determine the profitability of individual customers, intelligently set pricing, determine optimal freemium models, identify tech debt that could yield COGS improvements if addressed, and so on. While the actual metric differs from company to company (Netflix is cost per stream, you might be cost per API call, or cost per deployment - the options are as varied as there are SaaS offerings), the idea that one must understand it is universal. Pitch a SaaS business to a VC and you’ll be asked about your “cost per unit of business value.” CloudZero addresses the challenge of generating such a metric for our customers. 

Is there a “cost per X” that non-SaaS businesses leverage ?

But SaaS companies aren’t the only ones leveraging cloud. Traditional IT workloads are quickly gaining on software product businesses as a leading use of cloud. So what about cost there? I know that cost is a major concern to those companies as well - particularly in these times dealing with global financial uncertainty. Teams have budgets, waste is a big target, and cost figures into the architecture of innovation for some. But is there a focus on cost in a unit economics sense for non-SaaS cloud use-cases? Is there a “cost per X” that non-SaaS businesses leverage to understand the impact and profitability of the software they deliver to their customers (both internal and external)? Would the IT department of a manufacturing company, for example, be interested in understanding the "cost per finance report" they deliver? Or does a bank track “cost per account history retrieval” or such for a customer service application? Or are non-SaaS software projects only focused on the operating cost of the project itself - how much does this HR app cost per month? Or the spend per team - the data science team shouldn’t exceed $X per month on AWS service Y?

If you’re a cloud user building and operating non-SaaS applications, I’d love to hear from you. How is cost strategic in your world?