Costs

What this menu is for

Costs & Usage is the FinOps workspace for AI consumption. It explains where spend comes from, whether the data is trustworthy, who owns it, and which next action reduces risk or waste.

Use this menu for cost investigation, allocation, forecast review, finance exports, data quality checks, and usage-level analysis.

How Costs differs from Billing

Costs shows AI provider usage and AI operating cost. Billing shows your Kadryn subscription, invoices, plan limits, and payment status.

If a model bill looks wrong, start in Costs. If the Kadryn subscription, invoice, card, or plan limit looks wrong, start in Billing.

Tabs

• Overview: plan-aware readiness, spend summary, trend, coverage, and next action.
• Cost drivers: dimensions that explain spend changes by provider, model, project, team, workflow, tenant, or customer.
• Cost signals: anomalies, risks, missing attribution, pricing gaps, and FinOps signals to review.
• Usage events: source events, request context, trace links, and drill-down investigation.
• Forecast: monthly projection, drift, run rate, and scenario review when the plan includes forecasting.
• Unit economics: cost per outcome, feature, customer, workflow, or business unit.
• Allocation: showback, ownership, chargeback preparation, and unallocated spend cleanup.
• Data health: freshness, completeness, pricing coverage, metadata coverage, and ingestion quality.
• Reports: exports, dashboards, scheduled deliveries, report runs, and finance-ready packs.

Recommended workflow

1. Open Overview to confirm the workspace has plan-relevant readiness.
2. Check Data health before making finance decisions.
3. Use Cost drivers to explain movement.
4. Use Cost signals to find what needs attention.
5. Use Allocation and Unit economics to assign ownership.
6. Use Reports when the numbers are ready to share.

Plan behavior

Costs is plan-aware. Locked tabs represent capabilities outside the current plan. They are not operational failures and should not reduce readiness for the plan you have.

For example, a workspace without report scheduling should still be healthy if its purchased cost visibility, data health, and allocation surfaces are ready.

Security and governance

• Provider credentials belong in Provider Keys, not in reports, notes, or screenshots.
• Use role-based access for exports and chargeback workflows.
• Keep customer, tenant, environment, project, and team metadata consistent.
• Review pricing gaps before distributing finance reports.
• Prefer trace links and event IDs when investigating disputes.

Related menus

Use Provider Keys to manage provider credentials, Developers to debug ingestion, Guardrails to enforce budgets, and Billing for Kadryn subscription management.