Comparison
Google Cloud Billing MCP vs Costory: What It Can't Tell You
Google's Billing MCP is useful to look up billing accounts, project links and SKU prices. It does not return spend, so it cannot answer “why did our GCP bill go up?”. Costory reads the BigQuery billing export, so it can answer spend questions by project, label, team and feature, next to your other providers.
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 Google Cloud Billing MCP if: Google's Billing MCP is useful to look up billing accounts, project links and SKU prices. It does not return spend, so it cannot answer “why did our GCP bill go up?”.
Choose Costory if: Costory reads the BigQuery billing export, so it can answer spend questions by project, label, team and feature, next to your other providers.
Side by side
Claude alone, with the Google Cloud Billing MCP | Claude + Costory | |
|---|---|---|
Delivery | Google-hosted MCP endpoint | Hosted remote MCP (OAuth), EU data residency |
Providers | Google Cloud only | AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI, Kubernetes, Snowflake, Datadog, OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor and more |
Allocation | None: exposes billing accounts, project billing info, IAM and SKU prices | Virtual Dimensions (teams, products, envs), works with incomplete tagging |
Explaining changes | No spend data, so no change analysis | Deploys, CI/CD and custom events next to cost |
Actions | Billing account and pricing lookups | 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 | No charge for the endpoint | Flat: €250 per month or €1,000 per month (billed annually) |
Where Google Cloud Billing MCP is strong
Google's Billing MCP is useful to look up billing accounts, project links and SKU prices. It does not return spend, so it cannot answer “why did our GCP bill go up?”.
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 Google Cloud Billing MCP?
Costory reads the BigQuery billing export, so it can answer spend questions by project, label, team and feature, next to your other providers.
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