Welcome to CostGlass

What CostGlass does, who it is for, how your data gets in, the plans and regions, and a plain-English glossary.

Welcome to CostGlass

CostGlass shows you what your cloud, AI and software vendors cost, explains why it changed, and helps you spend less, all from one place.

Where in CostGlassDocumentation → Start here

PlanAll plans

Time needed10 minutes to read

In short

CostGlass brings the bills from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, DigitalOcean, Linode, Cloudflare, Kubernetes clusters and AI/SaaS vendors into one dashboard, in one currency of your choice.
It is read-only by default: it reads billing and inventory data and never changes your cloud. The one optional exception is the AWS Instance Scheduler, which can start and stop the instances you schedule.
Plans are Free, Starter, Growth, Scale and Enterprise. Higher plans unlock more connections and more features, such as Kubernetes costs, commitments and uptime monitoring.
Your organisation lives in one data region, chosen at sign-up. It cannot be changed later.
The glossary at the bottom of this page explains every term used across the product in plain English.

What CostGlass does

Cloud bills are long, technical and arrive after the money is spent. CostGlass reads them for you, keeps a clean history, and turns them into answers. This practice of understanding and controlling cloud spend is often called FinOps(financial operations). You do not need to know FinOps to use CostGlass: every page explains itself, and this guide explains the vocabulary.

The question you have	Where CostGlass answers it
How much have we spent this month, and where is it going?	Dashboard and Cost Explorer
What will the month cost in the end?	Forecasting and the Projected Month-End widget
Why did a cost suddenly jump?	Anomalies
Are we on budget?	Budgets
What can we cut?	Savings, Rightsizing, Commitments and the Instance Scheduler
Which team or product owns this spend?	Tags, Virtual Tagging and the organisation hierarchy
What resources do we actually have running?	Cloud Resources
Is our service up, and who do we ask for help?	Uptime, incidents and support requests

The Dashboard: spend to date, projected month-end, savings and your connected clouds in one view.

Who it is for

Engineering leads and platform teams who want to see which services and clusters drive the bill and fix waste.
Finance and FinOps practitioners who need trustworthy month-end numbers, budgets, forecasts and reports they can export.
Managers and executives who want a single page that says whether spend is on track.
Small and mid-sized companies that do not have a dedicated FinOps team. The Scale and Enterprise plans include time from CostGlass engineers to help act on what the tool finds.

Everyone in your organisation has a role: owner, admin or member. Owners and admins manage connections, budgets, alert rules and teammates. Members can look at data. See Team and access.

How your data gets in

You connect each cloud or vendor once, using the access method that provider offers for third parties. CostGlass then pulls fresh data automatically, roughly every six hours. The steps for each cloud are in the connection guides; here is the overview.

Source	How CostGlass is given access	What it can do
AWS	A role created by a CloudFormation template you deploy, plus an AWS Cost and Usage Report delivered to a storage bucket you own.	Read costs and inventory. The optional Instance Scheduler adds start and stop permissions.
Microsoft Azure	You approve the CostGlass app for your directory, then give it the Reader and Cost Management Reader roles.	Read only.
Google Cloud	A billing export to BigQuery, with read roles granted to a CostGlass service account.	Read only.
Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud	A read-only user (Oracle) or role (Alibaba) created by a stack you apply in your own account.	Read only.
DigitalOcean, Linode, Cloudflare	An API token that you create and paste in. CostGlass tests it before saving it.	Read only.
Kubernetes clusters	A small agent you install in the cluster with Helm. It pushes cost data out; nothing connects in.	Reports cost and health data.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Datadog, Snowflake	An admin or read key (or, for Snowflake, a key pair) that you create. CostGlass tests it before saving it.	Read cost and usage reports.

Read-only by default, with one exception

CostGlass never changes your infrastructure to collect cost data. The only feature that writes to your cloud is the Instance Scheduler (AWS only). It is optional: it is a checkbox when you generate the AWS template, and without it the role is strictly read-only. If a support request ever needs our engineers to touch your infrastructure, they ask you to grant a separate, scoped permission first.

Credentials you provide (tokens, keys, role details) are held in a secrets store, not in plain text. For the full security picture see How CostGlass accesses your data.

Note

Some data takes time to appear the first time. AWS Cost and Usage Reports can take up to 24 hours to deliver their first file, and Cloudflare, Oracle and Alibaba have their own first-delivery delays. The page you are on says so when this applies.

Plans

Your plan is shown in Settings → Billing & Plans, where you can upgrade, add a card and download invoices. Paid plans start with a 14-day trial. Prices below are the monthly prices in US dollars shown on that page; Enterprise is quoted individually.

Plan	Monthly price	Cloud connections	What it adds
Free	$0	1	Cost visibility for one cloud account, anomaly detection, savings recommendations, budgets, alerts.
Starter	$99	3	More accounts, longer history and forecasting, tag explorer and compliance, email and Slack alert rules.
Growth	$499	10	Kubernetes costs, commitments, virtual tags, the Instance Scheduler, uptime monitoring and the support-request desk.
Scale	$1,499	25	Everything in Growth, plus single sign-on, AI-written anomaly explanations and hours from CostGlass engineers.
Enterprise	Custom	Unlimited	Everything in Scale, with options such as a dedicated deployment in a separate cloud account.

What greyed-out menu items mean

Menu items your plan does not include are shown greyed out with a padlock. Click one to see which plan unlocks it. Today these are Kubernetes Costs, Virtual Tagging, Commitments, Instance Scheduler and Uptime (Growth and above) and Single sign-on (Scale and above). The server enforces plan limits too, so a greyed-out page is not reachable by typing its address.

Connection limits

The number of cloud connections you can hold depends on your plan (the numbers above). Trying to add one more shows an upgrade prompt. The limit the app enforces is the one shown when you connect an account, so if a plan card elsewhere quotes a different number, trust the app.

Regions: where your data lives

CostGlass runs in separate regional cells. Each cell has its own database, API and sign-in service, so your organisation's data is stored and processed in one region only. At sign-up you pick the region on the Where should your data live? screen. The regions that are open today are Virginia (US) and London (UK); the screen lists exactly what is available and marks the default.

Each region has its own website address, such as us.costglass.com or uk.costglass.com. After signing in you work on your region's address.
costglass.com itself is the public website. It never shows your data. To sign in, choose your region on the sign-in screen and you are sent to the right place.
The region is fixed when the organisation is created. To use another region, create a separate organisation there.
Each region keeps its own users. An email address that already belongs to an organisation in one region cannot sign up or be invited in another.

More detail, including retention settings, is in Data residency.

How to learn CostGlass

Follow the quickstart

Open Quickstart: your first hour. It takes you from sign-up to a working budget and alerts.

Learn the layout

Read Finding your way around for the menu, top bar and shortcuts.

See the pages

The screenshot tour shows every page with what to expect on it.

Ask CostGlass AI

On Cost Explorer, Reports, Anomalies, Forecasting, Savings, Kubernetes Costs and Cloud Accounts there is a CostGlass AI button. It opens an assistant that can explain the page and answer questions about your data.

Glossary: the words used across CostGlass

Short, plain definitions. Each one links to the guide that goes deeper where there is one.

Provider: The company that sends you a bill or runs your infrastructure: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, DigitalOcean, Linode, Cloudflare, or an AI/SaaS vendor such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Datadog or Snowflake. Pages show a coloured badge per provider.
Cloud account / connection: One entry in Settings → Cloud Accounts: the access you gave CostGlass to one provider. Connections count towards your plan's limit. See Manage accounts.
Sub-account: A smaller account inside a connection. For example, one member account in an AWS Organization, one Azure subscription or one Google Cloud project. Cost Explorer can group spend by it.
Organisation: Your company's workspace in CostGlass: its users, connections, budgets, settings and plan. Everything you see belongs to one organisation, in one region.
Organisation hierarchy node: A box in a tree you draw under Settings → Hierarchy, for example a business unit or team, onto which you map cloud accounts. A user can be limited to a node so they only see that part of the spend. See Organisation hierarchy.
Month-to-date (MTD): Spend from the first of the current month up to the latest day of data. It is always partial until the month ends, so comparisons that use it are labelled like-for-like.
Unblended (Real Cost): Cost exactly as the provider billed it, on the day it was charged. This is the default. If you pay an upfront fee for a commitment, that whole fee shows on the day it was paid.
Amortised cost: Cost with upfront and commitment fees spread across the period they cover. It is smoother and better for comparing teams or months. Cost Explorer has a selector for it.
Credits: Promotional credits, refunds and similar adjustments the provider applies. By default figures are net of credits (what you were actually invoiced). Cost Explorer and Reports can show gross usage or the credits alone.
FOCUS: The FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification: an open standard that gives every provider's billing data the same column names. CostGlass stores all spend in this shape, which is why one page can compare clouds. The FOCUS 1.0 page under Settings → Connections exports it as a CSV.
CUR: The AWS Cost and Usage Report: AWS's most detailed billing file, delivered to a storage bucket in your account. CostGlass reads it for AWS costs and to discover resources from billing lines.
Anomaly: A day when a service cost clearly more than its usual pattern, with an explanation and a severity. See Anomaly detection.
Budget: A spending limit you set for a month, optionally narrowed to a cloud, account, service or tag value, with alerts as you approach it. See Budgets.
Forecast: A projection of where spend will end up, based on your stored history. A projection is not a promise. See Forecasting.
Savings recommendation: A specific action that should reduce your bill, with the monthly saving and how that figure was reached (measured, list price, vendor estimate or a stated estimate). See Savings.
Rightsizing: Moving a resource to a smaller or larger size because its measured use does not match what you pay for. See Rightsizing.
Commitment: A discount you earn by promising to use a certain amount of a cloud for one or three years, such as a Savings Plan or Reserved Instance. CostGlass tracks coverage, utilisation and expiry but never buys one for you. See Commitments.
Tag: A label (key and value, such as team=payments) attached to a cloud resource. Tags are how spend is assigned to owners. See Tagging strategy.
Virtual tag: A tag defined inside CostGlass by rules, so you can assign spend to a team or product without changing anything in the cloud. See Virtual Tagging.
Run-rate: What a cost would be over a full period if the current level continued, for example today's daily spend times the days in the month. Kubernetes costs are shown as a monthly run-rate projected from the latest measurement.
Currency display: Costs are stored in the provider's own currency and in US dollars. The currency selector in the top bar (USD, EUR or GBP) only changes how amounts are shown, converting from US dollars at a live exchange rate. Your choice is remembered in your browser. Small differences from the rate your finance team uses are normal.

Will CostGlass change anything in my cloud?

No, with one optional exception. Everything is read-only except the AWS Instance Scheduler, which you must tick when generating the AWS template and which can only start and stop the instances and Auto Scaling groups you schedule.

How soon will I see data after connecting?

Normally within about six hours, and you can ask for it sooner with the Fetch data now banner on the Dashboard. AWS Cost and Usage Reports can take up to 24 hours for the first delivery. See the Quickstart.

Can I change my data region later?

No. The region is fixed when the organisation is created. To use another region, create a separate organisation there.

Why do some menu items have a padlock?

They belong to a higher plan. Click the item to see which one. You can upgrade under Settings → Billing & Plans.

Is there a light theme?

No. CostGlass has a single dark theme and no light/dark switch.

All Documentation Guides

Welcome to CostGlass — What CostGlass does, who it is for, how your data gets in, the plans and regions, and a plain-English glossary.
Quickstart: your first hour — Sign up, connect a first cloud, invite your team, set a budget and turn on anomaly alerts, with a first-week checklist.
Finding your way around — A tour of the sidebar, top bar and page controls: what every page answers, plan gating, currency, language, links and caching.
Dashboards — The Overview dashboard widget by widget, plus building custom dashboards you can share with your organisation.
Cloud Resources — The multi-cloud inventory: filters, search, categories, estimated cost, terminated resources and CSV or Excel export.
Uptime, incidents & support requests — Monitor public endpoints, route alerts, see incidents and raise requests to CostGlass engineers.
How CostGlass accesses your data — Security and data ingestion architecture: how CostGlass reads multi-cloud billing and telemetry through read-only roles and least-privilege permissions.
Dashboard & Platform Screenshot Tour — Visual walkthrough of the CostGlass interface with screenshots covering multi-cloud spend, Cost Explorer, anomalies, Kubernetes allocation, and savings.
Connecting your clouds: overview — Every cloud and service you can connect, how each one connects, what access it needs, how long data takes and your plan limits.
Connect AWS (CloudFormation) — Deploy the generated CloudFormation template, choose organization or single account and optional features, then verify.
Connect AWS with Terraform instead of CloudFormation — A Terraform equivalent of the generated AWS template, with an Organization variant and a way to compare it to the wizard.
Connect Azure — Admin consent for the CostGlass application, Reader and Cost Management Reader roles, management group or subscription scope, and a Terraform version.
Connect Google Cloud — Enable the FOCUS BigQuery export, run the IAM grants CostGlass prints, verify, and a Terraform version.
Managing connected accounts — The Cloud Accounts page: statuses, syncing, errors, naming, disconnecting, and the FOCUS 1.0 and CUR Export pages.
Connect Oracle Cloud (OCI) — Give CostGlass read-only access to Oracle Cost and Usage Reports with a Resource Manager stack or your own Terraform.
Connect Alibaba Cloud — Connect Alibaba Cloud through Bill Subscription files in OSS and a read-only RAM role created by a ROS template.
Connect DigitalOcean — Connect DigitalOcean accounts with a read-only personal access token and see invoices by month.
Connect Akamai / Linode — Connect Linode (Akamai Connected Cloud) accounts with an account read-only token.
Connect Cloudflare — Connect Cloudflare usage-based charges with a Billing Read account token and see credits and unpaid debt.
Connect OpenAI, Anthropic, Datadog and Snowflake — Connect AI and software vendors with admin keys or a Snowflake key pair so their spend sits beside your cloud costs.
Cost Explorer — Slice, compare and drill into spend across every connected cloud: group by, filters, charts, overlays, details, AI, links and export.
Saved views, saved filters & scheduled emails — Keep, share and email the Cost Explorer views you use often, and reuse include/exclude filters across views and reports.
Reports — Build, compare, export, save and schedule spend reports, with presets, Excel, CSV and PDF exports.
SaaS & AI Spend — Spend and token analytics for OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Datadog, Snowflake and cloud AI services.
Unit Economics — Cost per business unit: define metrics, send volumes, set targets and alerts.
Connect a Kubernetes cluster — Install OpenCost and the CostGlass exporter in your cluster so cost data is pushed to CostGlass every 15 minutes.
Kubernetes Costs page — Understand cluster, namespace, workload and pod costs, idle capacity, rightsizing, carbon and health.
Tagging strategy: getting the most from tags — How to tag cloud resources, enforce tagging, and when to use cloud tags or virtual tags in CostGlass.
Tag Explorer — Group billed spend by the value of a tag, see tag coverage per cloud and drill into resources.
Tag Compliance — Define required AWS tags, measure compliance, and fix missing tags with Quick Tag, batch apply or a CLI script.
Virtual tagging — Allocate spend by team, product or environment with rules, no cloud changes, with a rule builder and CostGlass AI.
Forecasting — Forecast month-end spend, the next months and a yearly run-rate, and simulate the cost of changes.
Budgets — Create spending limits for a cloud, account, service or team, and see how CostGlass budgets differ from native AWS, Azure and Google budgets.
Anomaly detection — How CostGlass finds unusual daily cost, how to tune it, explain it and be notified.
Cost alerts — Alert when spend rises versus the previous day, week, month or quarter.
All alert and notification types — A comparison of every alert and notification in CostGlass, with channel setup and testing.
Issues & annotations — Dated notes on spend, and a lightweight issue tracker for cost work with Jira push.
Savings playbook — A prioritised, step-by-step programme for reducing your cloud bill, with a 30/60/90-day plan.
Savings recommendations — How the Savings page finds, prices and tracks savings for every connected cloud and platform.
Rightsizing — Find servers and databases that are too big, or too small, using real CPU and memory measurements.
Commitments: Savings Plans & Reserved Instances — Track coverage, utilisation, expiry and purchase recommendations for Savings Plans, Reservations and committed use discounts.
Instance Scheduler — Start and stop non-production servers on a weekly schedule to stop paying for idle hours.
Giving your team access — Invite people, choose Owner, Admin or Member roles, remove users and limit what they see.
Setting up your organisation hierarchy — Build a tree of nodes, place cloud accounts by hand, rule or CSV, and scope people to a branch.
Designing your hierarchy (with enterprise examples) — Principles and worked patterns for AWS Organizations, single accounts, multi-cloud groups, MSPs and regulated regions.
Single sign-on (SAML & OIDC) — Connect Okta, Entra ID, Google Workspace or another provider, verify your domain, test and require SSO.
API keys & AI assistants (MCP) — Create API keys and connect Claude Desktop, Cursor or Claude Code to your cost data.
Audit log — See who changed what and when, with before and after values, kept for 24 months.
Data residency & retention — Your fixed region, how long cost history is kept, purge now and the data handling summary.
Notification settings, Jira & chat — Weekly spend summary, Slack and Teams webhooks, and connecting Jira Cloud.
Troubleshooting & Common Setup Fixes — Solutions for common cloud connection and ingestion issues across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OCI, Alibaba Cloud, Kubernetes, and SSO.

Welcome to CostGlass