Connection guide
How to connect GitHub Copilot (VS Code) to your Google Cloud costs
Connect GitHub Copilot to your Google Cloud costs through Costory's FinOps MCP. GitHub Copilot gets Google Cloud spend allocated to teams and features, next to the deploys and metrics that explain it.
What you can ask GitHub Copilot about Google Cloud
“Which GCP projects drove this month's increase?”
“Explain our spend-based CUD coverage and what is uncovered.”
“Send a weekly Slack report of the GCP services that moved.”
“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 Google Cloud cost through BigQuery billing export with detailed usage (+ CUD metadata), normalizes it into one cost model alongside your other providers, and allocates it with projects, labels, CUD metadata, Virtual Dimensions. 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.
Google's official Cloud Billing MCP exposes accounts, IAM and SKU prices, not your spend.
Set up in about 30 minutes
1. Connect Google Cloud to Costory. Follow the Google Cloud 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:
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
Google's official Cloud Billing MCP exposes accounts, IAM and SKU prices, not your spend.
Google Cloud tools compared
Google Cloud Billing MCP | Costory MCP | |
|---|---|---|
Scope | Google Cloud only | AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, data platforms, LLM APIs |
Allocation to teams | Not built in | Virtual Dimensions |
Deploys and events next to cost | No | Yes (GitHub, CI/CD, custom events) |
Actions | Provider-specific | Alerts, reports, dashboards, events in Costory |
Based on each tool's public documentation; check current docs before deciding.
FAQ
Does GitHub Copilot get write access to my Google Cloud 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 Google Cloud permissions does Costory need?
Read access to billing data only. The exact permissions are listed in the Google Cloud 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 Google Cloud
What the Costory agent can watch, investigate and report on for you, with this in the loop.
All playbooks
Costory notices
Every Monday at 9:00, for each team.
Weekly showback per team, posted in each team's Slack channel
Every engineering team gets its own weekly cost report in its own Slack channel, scoped to the services it owns.
See the playbook
Costory notices
Spend on a team, service or account deviates from its baseline.
Investigate a cost spike and find the deploy behind it
When spend moves, the agent finds the deploy, team and service behind it, checks incidents and provider events from the same window, and posts the likely cause.
See the playbook
Costory notices
An anomaly is detected, any time of day.
Investigate anomalies in a Slack thread with the FinOps agent
When an alert fires in #finops or a team channel, reply in the thread and the FinOps agent investigates: which team, which service, which deploy.
See the playbook
Costory notices
Monthly, or when a unit cost drifts beyond your threshold.
Track cost per customer, per request or per active user
Combine allocated cloud cost with your business and usage metrics to build unit costs that leadership can track over time.
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