How to connect GitHub Copilot (VS Code) to your Anthropic costs

What you can ask GitHub Copilot about Anthropic

• “What is our Anthropic API spend by key and model?”

• “How much are Claude Code seats vs API usage costing us?”

• “Alert me if Anthropic spend exceeds the monthly budget.”

• “Which team owns most of this month's increase?”

• “Set up a weekly Slack report of this spend for #finops.”

What GitHub Copilot sees

Costory ingests Anthropic cost through Anthropic Console API usage (Admin API) and claude.ai Enterprise costs, normalizes it into one cost model alongside your other providers, and allocates it with API keys, workspaces, models. Through the MCP server, GitHub Copilot 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

• Copilot in VS Code reads Costory from .vscode/mcp.json, under "servers", with type "http" and the Costory URL. Committing that file shares the setup with the repository.

• Prompt caching writes cost more than reads; batch vs standard tiers change unit price.

Set up in about 30 minutes

1. Connect Anthropic to Costory. Follow the Anthropic 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 VS Code with GitHub Copilot.

Add Costory to .vscode/mcp.json and use Copilot in agent mode:

{
  "servers": {
    "costory": { "type": "http", "url": "https://app-api.costory.io/mcp" }
  }
}

{
  "servers": {
    "costory": { "type": "http", "url": "https://app-api.costory.io/mcp" }
  }
}

{
  "servers": {
    "costory": { "type": "http", "url": "https://app-api.costory.io/mcp" }
  }
}

No local proxy or Node.js is needed: point the client directly at https://app-api.costory.io/mcp.

Full client instructions: MCP setup guide.

Good to know

Prompt caching writes cost more than reads; batch vs standard tiers change unit price.

FAQ

Does GitHub Copilot get write access to my Anthropic 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 Anthropic permissions does Costory need?

Read access to billing data only. The exact permissions are listed in the Anthropic 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.