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.
Runs in
Slack · Teams · Email
First optimization recommendation
The next day
ROI
Pays for itself with the first recommendation you act on
# finops
Costory
APP
Weekly cost report for Payments: €18,420 (+6% vs last week). Top mover: Amazon RDS +€640 after Wednesday's instance class change. Down: CloudFront −€210. Reply in thread to ask why anything moved.
Each team lead reviews its numbers and replies in thread if something needs a closer look.
Playbook
What the agent does
From what Costory notices to what you decide. Costory suggests the next step in conversation, and you decide whether to go ahead.
Costory notices
Every Monday at 9:00, for each team.
Costory investigates
01
Map spend to teams
Virtual Dimensions map accounts, projects, labels and namespaces to teams. Shared and untagged cost is reallocated dynamically from the usage metrics you already have, so every team's report stays complete as usage moves.
02
Scope a report per team
Each Costory team has its own scope, so a report only shows that team's services and environments.
03
Pick the channel
Invite the Costory bot to #team-payments, #team-data and so on, then choose that channel as the report destination.
04
Ship it weekly
Reports post daily, on weekdays, weekly or monthly, with top movers versus the previous period.
Where you see it
Slack · #team-payments
You decide
Each team lead reviews its numbers and replies in thread if something needs a closer look.
Why it matters
A central FinOps dashboard nobody opens does not change behaviour. Teams act on cost when the numbers that concern them show up where they already talk, with enough context to know what moved.
Who it’s for
Platform leads, engineering managers, FinOps leads
Where it runs
Slack · Teams · Email
What you get
What lands in front of your team
A report per team
Scoped to what each team owns, so nobody scrolls past other teams' numbers.
Top movers
Biggest increases and decreases versus last week, by service.
Follow-up in thread
Engineers ask the FinOps agent why a line moved, right under the report.
Sources and assistants
What it connects
Data sources
Example prompts
Or drive it yourself
Set up
Create a weekly report for each team in our Teams list, scoped to their services, posted every Monday to their own Slack channel.
Review
Which teams' weekly reports showed the biggest increase over the last month, and what drove it?
FAQ
Questions about this playbook
Do teams need Costory accounts to read the report?
No. The report is posted in Slack, so anyone in the channel can read it. Costory accounts are only needed to open the underlying dashboards.
What if our tagging is incomplete?
Costory's Virtual Dimensions allocate with rules on accounts, projects, names and partial tags, so you don't need perfect tagging to start. Shared and untagged cost is reallocated dynamically using the metrics you already have (Datadog, Tsuga, BigQuery, Snowflake and more), and the allocation stays consistent as usage moves.
How long does this playbook take to set up?
Connecting your billing data and the Costory MCP takes under 30 minutes with Terraform or CloudFormation. The playbook itself takes minutes: pick the scope, the trigger and the Slack channel. The first billing data lands the next day, and the agent starts from there.
Does Costory change anything in our cloud accounts?
No. Costory reads billing exports and the metrics you connect, and has no write access to your cloud. Actions it takes create Costory objects only: alerts, reports, dashboards and events. Your team stays in control of every change.
Step-by-step guide in the Costory docs
Related playbooks
Run these alongside it
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
Every week, across every connected provider.
One showback across AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, AI and data platforms
Teams see all their costs in one place, whatever the provider: cloud, Kubernetes, data platforms and LLM APIs.
See the playbook
Costory notices
The 11th of every month, after month n-1 is frozen.
Monthly chargeback pack by cost center, ready for finance
A monthly, frozen view of allocated cost per cost center, exported to BigQuery or shared as a PDF for finance.
See the playbook
Put this playbook on call
Included in every plan, from €250/month. 30-day free trial: connect in under 30 minutes, get your first optimization recommendation the next day.
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