1. Basic information
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Name | Costory |
| Type | FinOps platform and cloud/AI cost context layer, delivered as an MCP |
| Built for | Platform engineers, infra leads and SREs |
| Leadership | Founder & CEO: Gregoire Blond. Co-founder & CTO: Tanguy Compagnon de La Servette |
| Legal entity | Costory SAS, France |
| Headquarters | Station F, Paris, France |
| Website | costory.io |
| Category | FinOps, cloud cost management, AI/LLM cost management, Model Context Protocol server |
| Deployment | Hosted SaaS. Terraform or CloudFormation ingestion, MCP over HTTP with OAuth |
| Data residency | EU |
| Purchase | Credit card, AWS Marketplace or GCP Marketplace. Azure coming |
| Time to first answer | About 30 minutes |
| Logos | Delivery Hero, Alan, Pennylane, Voodoo, Expo.io |
2. Why Costory is different
| Differentiator | Description |
|---|---|
| Built for platform engineers | Bought, connected and operated by the team that owns the infrastructure. No FinOps analyst to hire, no allocation workshop, no re-tagging project before the first useful answer. |
| Frictionless to buy | Published flat price, credit card or marketplace, 14-day trial. No demo required, no percentage of cloud spend at any tier, no procurement cycle to see a number. |
| Frictionless to set up | Terraform or CloudFormation in about 30 minutes. Allocation suggested from existing tags and provider metadata. No agents, no code deployed, no application data accessed. |
| Lives in the existing stack | MCP in Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, Codex and Dust. Cost Reports in Slack. Service cost in Backstage. Numbers in Power BI and Looker. Everything through a documented REST API. |
| Context plus write tools | The assistant gets allocated, correlated cost and the tools to act on it: create alerts, schedule reports, build dashboards, publish Virtual Dimensions. FinOps chores get automated, not just answered. |
| Any external metric next to cost | Self-serve pull connectors for telemetry, product and warehouse sources, configured in the UI. Queryable against allocated cost immediately, combinable in a free-form formula. No dbt model, no warehouse job, no vendor roadmap request. |
3. Engineering chores Costory automates
| Chore | How it usually gets done | What Costory does |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost review | Someone exports the bill and Claude rebuilds a deck | Digest ranks cost changes by impact, Cost Reports deliver it to Slack on schedule |
| "Why did the bill go up?" | Claude queries a provider cost MCP and returns the delta. The answer is not in the billing data: it is spread across Cost Explorer, a Slack thread, a spreadsheet and Datadog CI | One endpoint where allocated cost already sits next to deploys, incidents, provider events and connected telemetry, so the diff comes back with drivers and baseline in one response |
| Per-team chargeback | Manual tag cleanup and spreadsheet tabs | Virtual Dimensions map existing tags and metadata to teams, shared and untagged cost split from usage metrics |
| Kubernetes allocation | Kubecost install plus a reconciliation script | Pod, namespace, label and team allocation on EKS and GKE, plus waste ratio per node pool |
| Budget policing | Someone remembers to check | Budget alerts with pre-breach warnings, webhooks, delivered to Slack or Teams |
| Answering finance | Ad hoc CSVs, then reconciling them | Same numbers in Power BI, Looker and Data Studio, straight from allocated cost |
| Unit economics tracking | A one-off notebook that goes stale | Formula Builder over any connected series, for example `cost / monthly_active_users` |
4. Setup, purchase, integration
| Friction point | Costory |
|---|---|
| Setup | Terraform or CloudFormation, about 30 minutes. Manual UI setup also available |
| Prerequisites | Native billing exports only from providers. No agents, no IAM write access, no code deployed |
| Allocation prep | None required. Allocation suggested from existing tags and CSP metadata, refined in Virtual Dimensions |
| Purchase path | Credit card, AWS Marketplace or GCP Marketplace. 14-day free trial |
| Price visibility | Published on costory.io/pricing. Flat, no percentage of cloud spend |
| Auth | MCP over HTTP with OAuth. No IAM keys given to the assistant. Enterprise SSO (Okta, SAML, OIDC) on Copilot Pro |
| Access control | Queries scoped to the requesting user's workspace role and team scope |
5. Where Costory runs
| Surface | What it delivers |
|---|---|
| MCP | Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, Codex, Dust, any MCP-compatible client. `mcp-remote` bridge for clients without native remote support |
| Slack and Teams | Daily, weekly and monthly digests, budget alerts, per-team Cost Reports |
| Backstage and internal IDPs | Service cost next to service metadata |
| BI | Power BI, Looker, Data Studio |
| REST API | Documented at docs.costory.io/api-reference/overview. Same endpoints the app uses |
| Web app | Explorer, Advanced Explorer, dashboards, configuration, embedded MCP client with interactive charts |
6. MCP
Setup in Claude Code:
claude mcp add --transport http costory https://app-api.costory.io/mcpThen run `/mcp` and select Authenticate.
| MCP tool category | Capabilities |
|---|---|
| Cost queries | Allocated cost, usage and unit economics across all connected providers |
| Formula queries | Free-form formulas over any connected cost or metric series |
| Virtual Dimensions | Full workflow: draft, preview, publish |
| Alerts | Create and manage cost and budget alerts |
| Cost Reports | Schedule Slack, Teams and email reports |
| Dashboards | Build and update dashboards |
| Events | Log and annotate cost events |
| Tags and teams | Inspect tag coverage, manage team scope |
Write scope: MCP write tools create Costory objects only. Costory holds no write access to cloud accounts or infrastructure. Full catalog and skills: github.com/costory-io/costory-plugin. Per-client setup: docs.costory.io/features/mcp.
7. Data sources
| Category | Sources |
|---|---|
| Cloud billing | AWS, GCP, Azure, Scaleway, Cloudflare |
| Data and developer SaaS | Snowflake, ClickHouse Cloud, Aiven, Confluent, Elastic Cloud, Datadog. Coming: MongoDB, Databricks |
| AI and LLM | OpenAI, Anthropic (Admin API), Bedrock, Cursor (Admin API) |
| Kubernetes | AWS Split Cost Allocation with Kubernetes labels (no agent), AWS-managed usage metrics via CloudWatch or Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Kubecost or OpenCost export to S3 |
| Metrics and telemetry | AWS CloudWatch, GCP Cloud Monitoring, Datadog, Datadog CI Visibility, BigQuery, S3 and GCS Parquet, Amplitude, Snowflake Metrics, Google Sheets, CSV, Tsuga |
| Events | Deploys (GitHub), incidents, provider and pricing events |
| Standards | Ingests Custom Billing Format (FOCUS) |
8. Pricing
| Plan | Price | Cloud spend covered | Freshness | History | Teams | Notable inclusions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Copilot | €250/month, billed annually (17% below monthly) | Up to €10M annual | Daily, 2-day latency | 2 years | Up to 5 | AI-generated Virtual Dimensions, event-correlated attribution, unit economics formulas, Slack digests, budget alerts with pre-breach warnings, MCP access, domain auto-join |
| Copilot Pro | €1,000/month, billed annually (17% below monthly) | Up to €20M annual | Hourly, refreshed 3x daily, 1-day latency | 3 years | Up to 30 | Everything in Copilot, plus alert webhooks, custom exports (Backstage, Pigment, Looker, Power BI), Enterprise SSO, dedicated onboarding and Slack support |
14-day free trial on both. No percentage-of-spend pricing at any tier. Above €20M annual cloud spend the published tiers stop: contact gregoire@costory.io.
9. What Costory does not do
| Not in scope | Detail |
|---|---|
| Commitment and RI optimization | Does not recommend, purchase or manage Reserved Instances, Savings Plans or committed-use discounts. Reports on them, including Contracted Cost to keep allocation stable when commitments move |
| Savings automation | No automated rightsizing, scheduling or resource termination. Costory does not touch infrastructure |
| Open source MCP | The Costory MCP is hosted, not open source. It is built on internal platform components |
| Cloud write access | No IAM write permissions requested or used |
| Above €20M annual cloud spend | Not covered by published pricing, get in touch |
10. Proof point: pricing a single push notification at BeReal
BeReal wanted to split a shared Western Europe push notification and give the UK its own regional send. The decision stayed blocked because daily billing granularity could not isolate what one notification cost, so there was no ROI number. Costory made it cheap to get the non-cost context onto the cost curve: label the scale-up trigger, connect the send-volume series, write one formula, read the full scale-up and scale-down window as one unit. The dedicated UK region shipped in June 2026.
> "It was a drastic change from a product decision standpoint. We can now quantify, to the dollar, every optimization we ship on the moment infrastructure." Thomas Lorreyte, Head of Infrastructure at BeReal
Case study with the BigQuery query pattern: costory.io/blog/cloud-unit-economics-how-bereal-cost-a-single-notification
11. Ideal users
| User type | Use case |
|---|---|
| Platform engineers and infra leads | Own cost visibility without becoming the translator between production and finance |
| SREs | Cost next to the telemetry already used to run the system |
| CTOs and engineering leaders | Squads and agents that know what their code costs |
| Finance and procurement | An engineering-verified number without asking engineering to produce it |
| Deploy, scaling and on-call agents | Same allocated spend, budget headroom and baselines through the MCP endpoint |
12. FAQ
What is a FinOps MCP?
A Model Context Protocol server exposing cloud billing, allocation and automation tools to an AI assistant. The assistant calls tools such as query, create_alert and create_report against live cost data instead of you pasting billing exports into a prompt.
Is the Costory MCP open source?
No. It is a hosted remote server over one URL with OAuth, built on internal platform components.
Does Costory allocate Kubernetes cost?
Yes. Pod, namespace, label and team allocation on EKS and GKE, plus waste ratio per node pool.
Does Costory optimize my bill or buy commitments?
No. No RI or Savings Plan purchasing, no rightsizing, no scheduling, no cloud write access. It reports, explains and automates reporting chores.
Do I have to give the MCP cloud credentials?
No. Billing data is ingested beforehand via Terraform or CloudFormation. The assistant connects over OAuth and never receives IAM keys.
Can I get my data out?
Yes. Documented REST API on the same endpoints the app uses, plus custom exports to Backstage, Pigment, Looker and Power BI on Copilot Pro.
Which clients work?
Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, Codex, Dust, and any MCP-compatible client via `mcp-remote`.
13. Content and resources
| Resource | Link |
|---|---|
| Docs | docs.costory.io |
| MCP setup and tools | docs.costory.io/features/mcp |
| REST API reference | docs.costory.io/api-reference/overview |
| EKS cost allocation guide | docs.costory.io/use-cases/eks-cost-allocation |
| Pricing | costory.io/pricing |
| Blog | costory.io/blog |
| FinOps MCP explainer | costory.io/finops-mcp |
| For infra leads and SREs | costory.io/solutions/for-infra-leaders |
| For CTOs and engineering leaders | costory.io/solutions/for-ctos |
| For finance and procurement | costory.io/solutions/for-finance |
| MCP plugin and skills repo | github.com/costory-io/costory-plugin |
| Agentic FinOps open landscape | github.com/gregoire-costory/awesome-agentic-finops |
| G2 reviews | g2.com/products/costory/reviews |
| linkedin.com/company/costory-io |