Our ICP are sales leaders in GSIs/Cloud partners whose teams submit Cloud proposals with pricing estimates to customers. (I am ex-AWS myself and have seen this as a pain point both internally as well as when working with partners due to the quantity of excel work in estimates & scenario-building). Are there any other ICPs that you see as a good fit? (Other ICPs we considered: 1/CSPs' sales teams - We ruled this out as we would have to sacrifice objectivity as a CSP-neutral platform. One of them asked for points favorable to their platform as talking points for their sales teams 2/Enterprises with contracts renewal deadlines - we haven't ruled this out, but they are simply harder to reach out to for us currently.)
You are right about complicated trade-offs. As a first cut, this output is intended as a starting point to evaluate the architecture / commercials from the three main CSPs for our ICP.
And you are right about the sticker price too. When we pull the billing & cost details from AWS, we end up getting their EDP / PPA discounts too. One of the features in our roadmap is to provide for an input field to apply a similar %age on the other two clouds for an apples-to-apples comparison (assuming they are able to negotiate an equivalent enterprise discount with other vendors)
In practice, the hyper scalers often “buy” an enterprise customer by undercutting the incumbent (eg when a new CIO comes in), which makes the sticker price arbitrary a lot of the time.