Spreadsheets / Cost Explorer
One provider per console
Manual reconciliation every month
No event correlation
No LLM coverage
Context in one engineer's head
Costory
AWS, GCP, Azure, Datadog, LLMs in one view
Allocation runs on your existing tags
Deploys, pricing, traffic attached at ingest
OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Bedrock native
Shared across infra, CTO, finance
Where it breaks
Where the spreadsheet actually breaks
1
The monthly copy-paste. Every close: you pull services out of Cost Explorer, open the Anthropic and OpenAI invoices, and retype the numbers into cells. Add GCP or Azure and you're copy-pasting from three consoles, sometimes from a PDF, each with its own taxonomy. One typo stays in the allocation for a quarter before anyone catches it.
2
The allocation formula. The sheet is your allocation engine: nested IFs mapping services to teams, VLOOKUPs against a team list, resource-prefix rules you wrote once and now maintain by hand. A new service ships, a pricing tier changes, a tag is misspelled, and the formula drops lines into "unallocated" without telling you. You find out when the CFO asks why Payments is under budget.
3
The reorg. Payments merges with Billing, three squads get renamed, every formula that referenced them breaks. You spend an afternoon rewriting the rules, and historical numbers now split in two: "before the merge" and "after", with no clean compare when finance asks about the quarter.
Hidden cost
The hidden cost nobody counts
Explorer + spreadsheet workflow | Costory | |
|---|---|---|
Sessions per month | ~5 × 30 min | Weekly auto-digest |
Reconciliation | Manual, per close | Continuous |
Time cost per year | ~€14,000 eng time | €3,000 flat |
When maintainer leaves | Setup dies | Setup keeps running |
A note on AI
Before you replace Excel with a Claude prompt
If your plan is "I'll rebuild the spreadsheet with Claude Code and the AWS MCP," read vs DIY first. That setup is genuinely better at "what changed," but shares the same root cause: no persistent cost context layer.
The upgrade
What a persistent layer gives you
Allocation. Teams, products, environments mapped from existing tags.
Normalization. AWS, GCP, Azure, Datadog, LLMs in one format.
Correlation. Deploys, pricing, traffic attached to variances.
Explanation. One-line answer for finance, not a table.
Features
Features that replace the workaround
MCP server
Structured tools across every provider, queryable from Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client.
Virtual dimensions
Allocation logic that layers on top of your existing tags, without a re-tagging project.
Event correlation
Deploys, pricing changes, and traffic spikes tied to cost movements at ingest.
Slack reports
Weekly per-team digests and drift alerts, delivered in channel.
Cost Explorer
Drill into any line, share a saved view, jump to the deploy that caused the spike.
BI exports
Native PowerBI, Looker, BigQuery. Your existing reporting keeps working.
Pay for the context layer, not the dashboards
€250 / month flat — up to €10M annual spend
No percentage of cloud spend
No enterprise sales call
No need to hire a FinOps team
FAQ