About Playground Tech

Playground Tech is a Stockholm-based technical consultancy and Managed Service Provider focused on cloud transformation for highly regulated industries. Operating 24/7, they support strategy, infrastructure design, migration, workload modernization, and cloud operations across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

The Challenge

As Playground Tech transitioned from a Tier 2 Managed Service Provider (MSP) working through distributors to a Tier 1 provider serving customers directly, the need for clear cost visibility and streamlined multi-cloud invoicing became critical.

At the same time, they were paying excessive fees to a small FinOps vendor that was, as CTO and Co-owner Sebastian Rosander put it, "charging way, way above the value it was giving."

This combination of rising operational complexity and poor ROI drove Playground Tech to search for a better solution.

Why Vantage?

When evaluating solutions, Playground Tech considered several FinOps vendors. Their top priority was finding a platform that could provide multi-cloud cost visibility and automated invoicing — two areas where Vantage delivered.

Prior to Vantage launching general availability of their MSP platform, Playground Tech chose to work with Vantage because of the speed of execution for delivering on their needs. Vantage's API-first approach enabled automation that other vendors couldn't support, and their speed of execution evidenced by Vantage's public changelog gave Playground Tech confidence they could scale together.

Along the way, Playground Tech provided specifics on their use-cases and needs from a FinOps platform and Vantage's product, engineering and design teams ensured that the platform fully met their evolving needs. Eventually, Vantage went on to launch their full MSP platform generally available — built with input from Playground Tech.

Automated Customer Onboarding

One of Playground Tech's biggest operational hurdles was the manual work required to onboard each new customer. The process involved setting up accounts with contact email addresses, filling out forms, generating CloudFormation templates, and manually deploying infrastructure — a slow, error-prone workflow that created bottlenecks for the sales team.

Early in the partnership, Playground Tech leveraged Vantage's Terraform modules to meet customer requirements. This became the foundation for a fully automated onboarding process for both current as well as future clients they onboarded to the platform.

Today, what once required hours of manual work is a one-click operation.

We can make API calls, get a new account, and in the same run provision the CloudFormation template in the customer's account. Our salespeople basically just click in an internal portal, and then we have an account that starts provisioning the customer's environment.

Building the MSP Program with Vantage

As Playground Tech's MSP business grew, they needed advanced capabilities for their cloud resale model — from complex pricing adjustments based on private pricing addendums and enterprise agreements, to trimming line items and applying percentage-based rates to account for management overhead and financial risk.

Vantage actively developed these features in partnership with Playground Tech, turning feedback into production-ready solutions in weeks.

Many times you guys come up with even a better solution than we suggested. We would be poking around with an issue, and then a couple of weeks later, we have a feature live that solves the problem even better.

One of the biggest outcomes of this collaboration was the development of invoicing capabilities designed for MSPs. What once took two full days per month now takes just 10–15 minutes — a 95% reduction in invoicing time that frees Playground Tech's team to focus on growth.

Not only was the collaboration fast-paced and easy, but Playground Tech genuinely enjoys working with the Vantage team. "It's been a joy since day one. We get tremendous support from the team — everyone is super responsive when we have a request and really takes the time to understand our issue,” says Sebastian.

Turning Cloud Data into Business Value

Vantage helped Playground Tech move beyond tactical cost reporting and into strategic, executive-level conversations. With Vantage's business metrics feature, customers can upload sales data and correlate cloud spend with business performance, turning infrastructure costs into actionable KPIs.

We can actually sit down with CFOs and other VPs and executives within companies and look at the same numbers and discuss how they're trending with the customer's business.

This visibility lets clients see when cloud spend scales with revenue and spot costs that remain high when sales slow. The result is meaningful conversations at the C-suite level that position Playground Tech as a long-term partner, enabling premium pricing and long-term customer relationships.

Looking Forward: AI-Powered Optimization

Playground Tech is in a period of rapid growth. After being named the fastest-growing company in Sweden in 2023 and the second fastest in 2024, they're continuing to expand their team, take on larger customers, and enter new markets across Europe. Vantage has been a key enabler of this growth, giving Playground Tech the operational foundation to scale with confidence.

As the business grows, Sebastian sees AI as the next major lever for delivering differentiated managed services. By combining Vantage's rich cost and usage data with telemetry from other systems, Playground Tech aims to deliver real-time, financially aware infrastructure optimization. A key enabler of this vision is the Vantage MCP (Model Context Protocol), which makes cost and usage data accessible to external workflows and AI agents in real time.

"I'm hoping to have an AI agent connecting into your MCP, grabbing the numbers, and seeing where we're not utilizing servers, storage, and databases optimally,” Sebastian explains. "Then the agent can right-size based on those financial metrics in conjunction with telemetry and observability metrics from other platforms.”

For Playground Tech, this represents the next evolution of managed services, moving from traditional, static infrastructure management to event-driven, automated right-sizing powered by AI. This shift will allow Playground Tech to deliver continuous optimization at scale, giving customers a proactive, financially-aligned cloud experience that grows with their business.