Comparison
AWS Billing MCP: Official vs Costory
AWS's server is a strong, free choice for an AWS-only team that wants raw billing data in an assistant and is comfortable running a local server with IAM credentials. Costory fits when spend spans several providers or LLM and data platform bills, when you need cost allocated to teams, and when changes must be explained with deploys and metrics.
Claims checked: 2026-10-08
Costory is our product. Claims about other tools reflect their public documentation as of October 2026; check their current docs before deciding.
The short answer
Choose AWS Billing and Cost Management MCP if: AWS's server is a strong, free choice for an AWS-only team that wants raw billing data in an assistant and is comfortable running a local server with IAM credentials.
Choose Costory if: Costory fits when spend spans several providers or LLM and data platform bills, when you need cost allocated to teams, and when changes must be explained with deploys and metrics.
Side by side
Claude alone, with the AWS Billing MCP | Claude + Costory | |
|---|---|---|
Delivery | Free server you run locally (uvx or Docker) with your own AWS credentials | Hosted remote MCP (OAuth), EU data residency |
Account | No extra account; uses your own AWS credentials and IAM permissions | Hosted, requires a Costory account (30-day free trial) |
Providers | AWS only | AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI, Kubernetes, Snowflake, Datadog, OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor and more |
Allocation | Account, service and tag views from Cost Explorer and CUR; no team model | Virtual Dimensions (teams, products, envs), works with incomplete tagging |
Explaining changes | Cost Anomaly Detection; no deploy context | Deploys, CI/CD and custom events next to cost |
Actions | Read-oriented: Cost Explorer, Budgets, Cost Optimization Hub, Compute Optimizer, Pricing | Creates alerts, reports, dashboards and events in Costory; no cloud write access |
FinOps skills | You write and maintain your own prompts | FinOps skills included automatically through the MCP |
Tokens used by the agent | Raw billing rows go into the context window | Fewer: the agent queries allocated, aggregated data, not raw rows |
Cost feedback on each implementation | You build it | Cost of each change in Claude Code or Cursor, with deploys on the cost timeline |
Pricing | Free server; Cost Explorer API requests are billed by AWS | Flat: €250 per month or €1,000 per month (billed annually) |
Where AWS Billing and Cost Management MCP is strong
AWS's server is a strong, free choice for an AWS-only team that wants raw billing data in an assistant and is comfortable running a local server with IAM credentials.
Where Costory is different
Allocation first: Virtual Dimensions map accounts, projects, labels and tags to teams and features, even with incomplete tagging.
Explanations, not just numbers: cost changes are shown next to deploys, incidents and usage metrics.
Works in the assistants engineers already use: Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code Copilot and Dust via MCP.
Slack digests and alerts in the channel you choose (for example #finops), and investigation notebooks to keep findings in one place.
Flat pricing: Copilot €250/month (up to €10M annual cloud spend), Copilot Pro €1,000/month (up to €20M annual cloud spend), billed annually.
What Costory does not do
It does not buy Reserved Instances or Savings Plans for you.
It does not apply automated rightsizing.
It does not get write access to your cloud accounts (MCP actions create Costory objects only: alerts, reports, dashboards, events).
Can you use both?
Often, yes. Many teams keep their provider's native tools for account-level detail and use Costory for cross-provider allocation, reporting and AI-assisted investigations.
FAQ
Do we need Costory if we use AWS Billing and Cost Management MCP?
Costory fits when spend spans several providers or LLM and data platform bills, when you need cost allocated to teams, and when changes must be explained with deploys and metrics.
How long does Costory take to set up?
Under 30 minutes to connect your billing exports and the MCP, with Terraform or CloudFormation. Your first recommendation comes the next day, once the first billing data lands. A 30-day free trial is available.
Where is Costory's data hosted?
In the EU.
Connect in under 30 minutes. Get your first optimization recommendation the next day.
30-day free trial. Copilot, €250/month, or Copilot Pro, €1,000/month, billed annually.
First optimization recommendation
The next day
ROI
Pays for itself with the first recommendation you act on
Setup
About 30 minutes
Data residency
EU
Access
Read-only on your cloud