Connection guide
How to connect Claude to your Vertex AI costs
Connect Claude to your Vertex AI costs through Costory's FinOps MCP. Claude gets Vertex AI spend allocated to teams and features, next to the deploys and metrics that explain it.
What you can ask Claude about Vertex AI
“What is Gemini spend on Vertex by project and label?”
“How much of Vertex output cost is reasoning tokens?”
“Show Vertex next to OpenAI and Anthropic in one view.”
“Which team owns most of this month's increase?”
“Set up a weekly Slack report of this spend for #finops.”
What Claude sees
Costory ingests Vertex AI cost through GCP BigQuery billing export (project isolation or per-call labels), normalizes it into one cost model alongside your other providers, and allocates it with GCP project per team, request labels. Through the MCP server, Claude can query that allocated cost, compare periods, look up deploys and other events in the same window, and create alerts, reports and dashboards in Costory. It has no write access to your cloud accounts.
Good to know for this setup
You can also add Costory through Developer → Edit Config with the URL https://app-api.costory.io/mcp, then restart Claude Desktop.
Gemini 3.x bills internal reasoning as output tokens; regional endpoints carry a premium.
Set up in about 30 minutes
1. Connect Vertex AI to Costory. Follow the Vertex AI setup guide in the docs.
2. Map spend to owners. Use Virtual Dimensions to group accounts, projects, labels and tags into teams, products and environments, even where tagging is incomplete.
3. Add Costory to Claude (Desktop and web).
Open Settings → Connectors and click Add custom connector.
Name it Costory and paste
https://app-api.costory.io/mcpas the URL.Click Add, then Connect, and log in with your Costory account (OAuth).
Start a chat and ask a cost question.
Full client instructions: MCP setup guide.
Good to know
Gemini 3.x bills internal reasoning as output tokens; regional endpoints carry a premium.
FAQ
Does Claude get write access to my Vertex AI account?
No. Costory reads billing data you export to it. MCP actions create Costory objects (alerts, reports, dashboards, events) and never change your cloud resources.
What Vertex AI permissions does Costory need?
Read access to billing data only. The exact permissions are listed in the Vertex AI setup guide.
Where is the data stored?
Costory stores and processes data in the EU.
How much does it cost?
Plans start at €250/month (up to €10M annual cloud spend), billed annually, with a 30-day free trial. See pricing.
Playbooks
Playbooks for Vertex AI
What the Costory agent can watch, investigate and report on for you, with this in the loop.
All playbooks
Costory notices
A feature's model cost per request rises, or a new model ships.
Choose LLM models and routing based on cost per feature
The agent tracks per-model spend for each AI feature across OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock and Vertex AI, and recommends where a cheaper model or a routing change could fit.
See the playbook
Costory notices
Daily, as LLM provider costs refresh.
LLM cost allocation by team, feature and customer
Allocate model spend from OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, Bedrock, Vertex AI and OpenRouter to teams, features and customers.
See the playbook
Costory notices
Every Monday, across every AI provider.
All AI spend in one view: OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, Vertex AI and more
The agent tracks total AI spend across model APIs, cloud AI services and AI tools, and reports the weekly trend in one place.
See the playbook
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