In the latest episode of What the Tech from Boast, we sat down with Mike Weider, Co-Founder and CEO of Frugal AI, the world's first AI-native application cost engineering platform. Frugal empowers developers to reduce application costs by automatically fixing inefficient code patterns that run up cloud spend—bridging the friction between finance and engineering teams while helping deliver more agile products.

We first connected with Mike at SaaS North in Ottawa (where Boast had just celebrated the launch of Budget 2025 and enhanced SR&ED funding). Mike pitched Frugal at the TechTO Rocket Stage, and his perspective immediately stood out: this wasn't just another dev tool—it was a solution to a problem that's gone from painful to unsustainable.

Mike brings serious credentials to this mission. He's served as Founder and CEO at three previous venture-backed startups that all went on to major acquisitions. He's an independent board member at numerous businesses and nonprofits (including Invest Ottawa), and an active seed investor. His pattern-recognition across multiple successful exits gives him a unique lens on what problems are worth solving.

Boast accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

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Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

From Painful to Unsustainable: How Frugal AI Helps Developers Fix Cloud Cost Before It's Too Late