Every engineering organization faces the same recurring task: reporting on last month’s cloud invoice. The formats vary — Notion pages, PowerPoint decks, Slack threads — but the questions remain the same:
- What happened last month?
- Why did the cost increase?
- Where are the anomalies?
This work typically falls to senior SREs or infrastructure leads. It’s time-consuming, repetitive, and distracts from higher-priority engineering work.
Challenges
Manual monthly reporting involves:
- Collecting data from multiple tools (Cost Explorer, spreadsheets, Datadog, internal dashboards) wasting from ½ day to a full week per month.
- Manually identifying changes and correlating them with deploys, incidents, or reconfigurations.
- Explaining findings in business terms to finance or leadership
- Repeating this process every month, with inconsistent ownership
How Costory Helps
Costory automates monthly cloud reporting with Digest, our AI-powered report generator.
Digest breaks down your monthly costs into an intuitive tree format, highlighting the nodes that moved the most in a given month.
Billy, our AI FinOps assistant, does the heavy lifting. For each node, Billy analyzes your billing data, usage trends, and incident history.
Billy’s machine learning spots anomalies, traces them to root causes, and outputs a structured report which can be further annotated by the user to provide additional context
Synthesizing data from all nodes, Billy produces an executive summary, to be shared via Notion, Slack, or email.
Benefits
- Save engineering time (½ day to 1 week/month)
- Reduce manual error and improve consistency
- Enable self-service visibility for non-technical stakeholders
- Free engineers to focus on shipping and scaling infrastructure