Resources
Everything CostMon has written about not overpaying for your stack
One hub for the playbook, the guides, the calculators, and the reference pages, organized so you can find what you're looking for.
Guides
The Cloud & AI Cost Optimization Playbook
The full pillar guide: cutting cloud waste, controlling AI/LLM spend, and building a FinOps habit that fits a team that isn't huge.
Buyer's guideHow to Choose a Cost Monitoring Tool
A self-scoring buyer's guide: coverage, normalization, pricing alignment, and the red flags that separate a real tool from a dashboard demo.
Decision guideBuild vs. Buy
The real, fully-loaded cost of building your own cloud and AI cost-monitoring pipeline versus buying one. Includes an honest, interactive estimator and guidance on when DIY makes sense.
GuideThe AI Agent Cost Guide
Why agentic AI and multi-step tool-use workloads cost far more than a single API call. Worked scenarios run from one call to a runaway loop, plus how to cap it before the invoice does.
GuideHow to Cut Your LLM Bill Without Downgrading Your Product
Five real levers: context trimming, output discipline, prompt caching, model routing, and batch. Together they stack as an honest, multiplicative waterfall, with the exact prompt-caching break-even shown.
Tools & calculators
AWS Bill Analyzer
Drop in a Cost Explorer CSV and see where the money went last month.
ReferenceAWS Bill Decoder
Look up a cryptic AWS line item and find out what it means and why it showed up.
CalculatorAWS Data Transfer & Egress Cost Calculator
Price out internet egress, cross-AZ, NAT gateway, and inter-region transfer charges.
CalculatorAWS Storage Cost Calculator
Compare S3 storage classes and find gp2-to-gp3, orphaned-volume, and snapshot-archive savings.
CalculatorGPU Cost Calculator
Price nine EC2 GPU instance types and check whether the default alert rule would catch a forgotten node.
CalculatorObservability Cost Calculator
Price Datadog hosts, custom-metric cardinality, and logs alongside AWS CloudWatch's own meters.
CalculatorData Warehouse Cost Calculator
Price Snowflake warehouse credits and BigQuery bytes scanned, and see the on-demand-vs-reservation crossover.
CalculatorCommitment Discount Calculator
Compare Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and Spot against your actual utilization.
CalculatorKubernetes Cost Allocation Calculator
Split a cluster's node bill into what workloads used, what sat idle, and what the cluster itself costs.
CalculatorKubernetes Waste Analyzer
Paste kubectl output and see what your own cluster wastes, down to the namespace and workload.
CalculatorCost Alerts & Anomaly Detection Simulator
Run three runaway-spend scenarios through the same anomaly checks CostMon uses.
CalculatorSavings Calculator
Estimate what rightsizing, commitment coverage, and idle cleanup could save on your current bill.
CalculatorLLM Cost Calculator
Model token volume and prompt caching to see what an AI feature costs per request.
CalculatorCost Per Customer & Unit Economics Calculator
Blend your cloud, AI, and SaaS spend against customers and revenue to see your real margin.
CalculatorCloud & AI Spend Forecast Calculator
Project your run-rate and the month you'd cross budget from your current spend and growth rate.
CalculatorCloud Credit Runway Calculator
Find the month your cloud credits run out and the first full bill after they do.
CalculatorFlat vs. Percentage Pricing Calculator
See what a vendor fee tied to your spend or your savings costs as your bill grows.
ReferenceLLM API Pricing Reference
Every Claude, GPT, and Gemini API list price in one table.
CalculatorAI Spend Analyzer
Drop in a Claude or OpenAI usage export and see where the AI bill actually goes.
ReferenceCloud & AI Cost Optimization Checklist
Every cost lever from the Playbook as a trackable checkbox.
ReferenceCloud & AI Price Change Log
A dated, sourced log of every AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, OpenAI, and Anthropic price change that moved a bill.
ReferenceFOCUS: the FinOps Cost & Usage Standard, Explained
Plain-English definitions of BilledCost, EffectiveCost, ListCost, and ContractedCost, plus a sourced provider-support matrix.
ToolFOCUS Export Analyzer
Drop in a FOCUS export from AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud and get a conformance check plus a money breakdown.
CalculatorCost Allocation & Tag Coverage Scorer
Score how much of your bill can be pinned to a team, project, or customer.
CalculatorTag Coverage Analyzer
Drop in two AWS Cost Explorer exports and see the real share of your bill nobody owns.
ToolGuardrail Generator
Generate the Terraform, gcloud command, or curl request for the spend guardrail your provider already gives you for free.
Comparisons
How CostMon Compares
Honest, situational comparisons between CostMon and the other tools teams shortlist for cloud and AI cost monitoring.
ComparisonCostMon vs. Vantage
Flat pricing and normalized AI/LLM spend vs. a broad, spend-scaled multi-cloud visibility platform.
ComparisonCostMon vs. CloudZero
A self-serve, flat-priced daily view vs. an enterprise, sales-led unit-economics platform.
ComparisonCostMon vs. Kubecost
A whole-stack cloud + AI view vs. deep, Kubernetes-only cost allocation.
ComparisonCostMon vs. AWS Cost Explorer
One normalized number across every provider vs. the native, single-cloud AWS console.
ComparisonCostMon vs. Datadog Cloud Cost Management
A standalone, flat-priced view vs. a cost module inside the broader Datadog observability platform.
ComparisonCostMon vs. Finout
A narrower, size-independent flat rate vs. a broad FinOps platform priced on managed spend.
ComparisonCostMon vs. Infracost
Actual, after-the-fact spend tracking vs. pre-merge Terraform cost estimates. They are different problems, often used together.
Reference
The Cloud & AI Price Change Index
Original research computed from CostMon's own price change catalogue: how cuts, increases, and restructures split by provider, plus open-data JSON and CSV exports.
GlossaryCloud & AI Cost Glossary
Plain-English, vendor-neutral definitions for the terms that show up on every cloud bill, every AI invoice, and every FinOps review.
OverviewSolutions
A categorized directory of every connector CostMon monitors today: cloud, AI & LLM, data platforms, and dev tools. Includes deep-dive guides. AWS, GCP, and Azure for cloud. Anthropic, OpenAI, Amazon Bedrock, Vertex AI / Gemini, and Helicone for AI and LLM spend. Snowflake and Databricks for the data cloud. Datadog, GitHub, and Vercel for the rest of the stack.
ProductFeatures
How CostMon shows where your spend goes, alerts you when it breaks its baseline, and finds what to cut.
ProductSecurity
The access model, credential handling, and data practices behind every connector.
ReferenceConnector docs
The exact API call, minimum IAM policy, and honest limits for every connector, published before signup.
From the blog
See all posts →One Claude Model, Three Bills
One Claude model, sold by Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock and Google Vertex AI. The token rate is close. The invoice, surcharges and reports differ.
AI costsAI Coding Tools: What One Developer Really Costs
A seat price is the small number. See the three ways AI coding tools bill, a worked monthly figure per developer, and where the usage line shows up.
AI costsThinking Tokens: The Hidden Cost in AI Bills
Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini bill hidden reasoning as output tokens. Learn where that cost hides, which usage field shows it, and how to cap it.
Get the alert before the invoice.
Connect your first providers in minutes. CostMon flags a spike within days and lists what to cut. Pricing is flat. We take no percentage of your bill or your savings.