BRCKS vs CloudBurn

BRCKS Bot for WhatsApp

Update projects without ever leaving your chat app. Simply text the BRCKS Bot on WhatsApp to create tasks, check off checklist items, ask for project updates, or get instant answers. Every instruction sent via text is automatically logged and organized within the main BRCKS platform, ensuring nothing is lost while letting your team communicate in the tool they use every day. It eliminates app-switching and makes updating the project as easy as sending a message.

Checklists & Task Management

Create, assign, and monitor progress on tasks and daily checklists directly within BRCKS. Assign responsibilities to specific team members, set deadlines, and track completion in real-time. This feature replaces paper lists and scattered notes, providing a clear, digital record of what needs to be done, by whom, and by when, ensuring accountability and smooth progression from first fix to final sign-off.

Client Portal

Provide homeowners and clients with a beautiful, read-only window into their project's progress. They can view key milestones, latest photos, and important updates without gaining access to your internal tools, team chats, or sensitive documents. This keeps clients informed and engaged, building trust, while preventing them from disrupting the team's workflow with constant questions.

Free Subcontractor Access

Invite every trade and subcontractor to their relevant projects at no extra cost. They get full access to checklists, calendars, files, and schedules specific to their work, completely free. You only pay for your core internal team members. This removes the barrier to onboarding your entire supply chain, ensuring everyone has the information they need to stay on schedule.

Automated Pull Request Cost Analysis

CloudBurn integrates directly into your GitHub workflow to provide instant cost intelligence. Whenever a developer opens a pull request with Terraform or AWS CDK changes, CloudBurn automatically detects the infrastructure diff. It processes this data, calculates the exact monthly cost delta for the new or modified resources, and posts a detailed, easy-to-read cost report as a comment on the PR. This happens within seconds, giving your team immediate financial context without any manual intervention, making cost awareness a natural part of every code review.

Real-Time AWS Pricing Data

Your cost estimates are always accurate and up-to-date. CloudBurn does not rely on stale, averaged, or estimated pricing. Instead, it pulls real-time pricing data directly from AWS Price List API for the specific region and service you are deploying to. This ensures that the monthly cost projections in your pull requests reflect the actual rates you will be charged, accounting for nuances like instance types, storage volumes, and data transfer costs, so you can make decisions with complete confidence.

Detailed & Actionable Cost Reports

The platform goes beyond a simple total. Each CloudBurn PR comment breaks down the cost impact per resource, showing the current cost, the new projected cost, and the delta. It lists the specific AWS service, usage type, description, and hourly rate for complete transparency. This granular detail helps developers understand exactly which line of code is driving cost increases and facilitates productive conversations about optimization alternatives right at the point of change.

Seamless GitHub Integration & Security

Getting started is incredibly simple and secure. You install CloudBurn directly from the GitHub Marketplace, and all billing, setup, and permissions are handled 100% through GitHub. There are no separate logins, API keys to manage for the core service, or complex IAM roles required on your AWS account initially. This GitHub-native approach minimizes setup friction, leverages your existing security model, and gets your team protected from cost overruns in minutes.

Streamlining Daily Site Communication

Site managers and foremen use BRCKS to replace chaotic WhatsApp groups and emails. Daily instructions, photo updates of work completed, and urgent queries are all handled through the BRCKS Bot or app. This consolidates every conversation into a single project feed, saving over an hour a day previously spent searching through different apps and ensuring nothing gets missed.

Managing Subcontractor Deliverables

General contractors can invite all subcontractors for free, assigning them specific checklists and tasks within BRCKS. Each trade can see their scheduled work, access relevant files, and mark tasks as complete. This provides clear accountability, reduces the need for constant follow-up calls, and creates a transparent record of who did what and when.

Keeping Clients Updated and Happy

Builders and renovators use the Client Portal to proactively share progress. Instead of fielding daily "how's it going?" calls, they can direct clients to the portal to see recent photos, completed milestones, and next steps. This professional approach manages client expectations, reduces anxiety, and minimizes disruptive interruptions to the working team.

Centralizing Project Documentation

Project managers consolidate all meeting notes, site photos, material specifications, and change order discussions into BRCKS. The Project Files feature acts as a single source of truth for the entire project history, making it easy to find any document or recall any decision, which is crucial for handovers, compliance, and resolving any disputes.

Preventing Costly Misconfigurations in PR Reviews

The primary use case is catching expensive mistakes before they deploy. A developer might accidentally specify a t3.xlarge instance instead of a t3.micro, or provision a storage volume with excessive provisioned IOPS. Without CloudBurn, this error would silently go live and rack up thousands of dollars. With CloudBurn, the $200+ monthly cost spike is highlighted directly in the pull request, allowing the team to question and correct the configuration during review, preventing a budget surprise.

Enabling Cost-Aware Architecture Decisions

CloudBurn provides the data needed for informed trade-offs between performance, resilience, and cost. During a PR review for a new microservice, teams can discuss whether the proposed Fargate configuration with 4 vCPUs is necessary or if 2 vCPUs would be sufficient, using the immediate cost difference provided by CloudBurn. This embeds FinOps principles directly into the design phase, fostering a culture where cost efficiency is a key architectural consideration.

Streamlining Infrastructure Code Refactoring

When teams need to upgrade, scale, or refactor existing infrastructure, CloudBurn provides clear cost impact analysis. Whether you're migrating to Graviton instances, changing database tiers, or modifying auto-scaling rules, you can create a pull request and instantly see the financial implication of the change. This removes guesswork and spreadsheets, making refactoring projects predictable and financially accountable.

Educating Developers on Cloud Costs

CloudBurn serves as a continuous learning tool for engineering teams. By exposing the direct cost of every EC2 instance, RDS cluster, and Lambda function in the context of their code, developers build an intuitive understanding of cloud pricing. Over time, this leads to developers naturally selecting more cost-effective resources and designs from the outset, reducing the need for post-deployment optimization and creating a sustainably efficient cloud environment.

BRCKS is the construction project management platform that works the way your team already does. Built specifically for residential builders, trades, and homeowners, it solves the communication chaos that plagues every project. Instead of forcing your team to learn a complicated new app, BRCKS integrates seamlessly into your existing workflow, especially WhatsApp. It automatically pulls every project conversation, photo, update, and file from scattered chats and emails into one organized, central platform that you control. This means no more lost instructions in endless message threads, no more chasing subcontractors for updates, and no more confusion over decisions. The core value proposition is powerful simplicity: zero disruption for your team, complete oversight for you. From daily task checklists and team scheduling to sharing polished updates with clients, BRCKS keeps the entire project team—directors, site managers, trades, and homeowners—perfectly aligned, saving teams an average of 2+ hours daily and dramatically reducing costly delays and miscommunication.

CloudBurn is a proactive cost intelligence platform built for modern engineering teams. It is specifically designed for developers and DevOps engineers who use Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools like Terraform or AWS CDK to manage their cloud infrastructure. The core mission of CloudBurn is to shift cloud cost management left, integrating it directly into the developer's existing workflow. The traditional model of cloud spending is broken: teams are often blindsided by budget overruns weeks after deployment, when costly resources are already running and the money is spent. CloudBurn changes this reactive paradigm by providing immediate, actionable cost feedback during the code review process. It automatically analyzes infrastructure changes in pull requests, calculates the precise monthly cost impact using real-time AWS pricing data, and posts a clear report as a comment. This empowers developers to have informed discussions about cost versus performance, optimize configurations, and prevent expensive mistakes before code is merged and deployed. By embedding cost visibility seamlessly into GitHub, CloudBurn enables automated FinOps, fosters a cost-aware engineering culture, and delivers immediate return on investment by catching misconfigurations that would otherwise silently inflate the AWS bill.

How does BRCKS work with WhatsApp?

Your team continues using WhatsApp as normal. You add the BRCKS Bot as a contact in your project group or message it directly. When you send a text, photo, or voice note to the bot, it intelligently logs that update to the correct project and category (like tasks or files) in the main BRCKS platform. Your team doesn't need to change habits; BRCKS organizes the chaos in the background.

Do my subcontractors really get free access?

Yes. You can invite an unlimited number of subcontractors and tradespeople to collaborate on projects. They will have full access to the features necessary for their work on that project—like checklists, calendars, and files—without any cost to you or them. You are only billed for the seats used by your direct, internal employees.

Is the Client Portal secure?

Absolutely. The Client Portal is a read-only, curated view of the project. Clients cannot see internal team conversations, financials, or sensitive documents. They only see the updates, photos, and milestones you choose to share, giving them transparency without compromising your operational privacy or security.

What if my team isn't tech-savvy?

BRCKS is designed for real construction teams. The primary interface for many can remain WhatsApp, which they already know how to use. The web and app platforms are built to be simple, intuitive, and practical. The focus is on ease of use, requiring minimal to no formal training to get started and see immediate benefits.

How does CloudBurn calculate the cost estimates?

CloudBurn calculates estimates by analyzing the infrastructure diff from your Terraform plan or AWS CDK synthesis output. It identifies the specific AWS resources being created, modified, or destroyed. Then, it queries the real-time AWS Price List API using the resource's attributes (like instance type, region, and storage size) to fetch the exact On-Demand hourly rate. It extrapolates this to a monthly cost based on 730 hours of continuous operation, providing a clear and accurate projection for planning purposes.

Is my code or cloud credentials secure with CloudBurn?

Yes, security is a foundational principle. CloudBurn is installed via GitHub Marketplace and uses GitHub's OAuth for authentication. Your infrastructure code (the diff/plan output) is sent securely to CloudBurn's service for analysis. Importantly, CloudBurn does not require direct access to your AWS account or production cloud credentials to generate cost estimates. All pricing data is sourced from AWS's public Price List API, keeping your cloud environment isolated.

What IaC tools and cloud providers do you support?

Currently, CloudBurn provides deep, native integration for the two most popular Infrastructure-as-Code frameworks: HashiCorp Terraform and AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK). It is built specifically for AWS, as it leverages the AWS Price List API for accurate, real-time pricing. Support for additional cloud providers like Azure or GCP would depend on future development and community demand.

What is the difference between the Community and Pro plans?

The Community plan is free forever and provides core cost analysis for pull requests, perfect for getting started. The Pro plan trial unlocks advanced features for 14 days, which may include historical cost tracking, trend analysis, cost allocation tagging insights, and team management features. The Pro plan is designed for teams that need deeper FinOps capabilities and organization-wide visibility to maximize their cloud savings and governance.

BRCKS is a mobile-first construction project management app designed to centralize communication for residential builders, tradespeople, and homeowners. It tackles the common chaos of site coordination by replacing scattered emails, WhatsApp threads, and documents with a single, organized platform for tasks, photos, files, and updates. Users often explore alternatives for various reasons. These can include budget constraints, the need for different feature sets like advanced scheduling or accounting integrations, or a requirement for software that serves larger commercial projects or different team structures. The specific needs of your business and team are key drivers in the search. When evaluating other options, focus on core needs: seamless mobile usability for on-site teams, clarity in client communication, and robust tools for tracking tasks and decisions. The ideal alternative should streamline your daily workflow, reduce miscommunication, and create a reliable digital paper trail for the entire project lifecycle.

CloudBurn is a proactive cost intelligence platform for developers, specifically designed to shift cloud cost management left into the code review process. It belongs to the category of FinOps and developer tools that integrate directly into the engineering workflow. Users often explore alternatives for various reasons, such as budget constraints, needing support for different cloud providers or infrastructure tools, or requiring a different set of features like historical analysis or team management capabilities. Finding the right fit depends on your team's specific workflow and goals. When evaluating alternatives, consider how well the tool integrates with your existing development pipeline, the accuracy and depth of its cost estimations, and whether it provides actionable insights that developers can immediately use. The best solution is one that your team will actually adopt and use consistently to prevent cost overruns.