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 actually find the thing 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.
ChecklistThe Cloud & AI Cost Optimization Checklist
The actionable, trackable companion to the Playbook — every cost lever as a checkbox, with progress saved right in your browser.
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.
Pricing comparisonFlat vs. Percentage Pricing
Why a fee tied to your spend or your savings misaligns a vendor's incentive from yours — modeled out against a flat-rate alternative.
Decision guideBuild vs. Buy
The real, fully-loaded cost of building your own cloud and AI cost-monitoring pipeline versus buying one — an honest, interactive estimator plus when DIY actually 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 from one call to a runaway loop, and how to cap it before the invoice does.
Tools & calculators
Savings Calculator
Estimate what rightsizing, commitment coverage, and cleaning up idle resources could save on your current cloud bill.
CalculatorLLM Cost Calculator
Model token volume, input/output pricing, and prompt caching to see what an AI feature actually costs per request.
ReferenceLLM API Pricing Reference
Every Claude, GPT, and Gemini API list price in one table — input/output cost per million tokens, context window, and tier, with links to each provider's official pricing page.
CalculatorCost Per Customer & Unit Economics Calculator
Blend your cloud, AI/LLM, and SaaS spend against active customers and MRR to see cost per customer, gross margin, and how it compares to SaaS benchmarks.
CalculatorCloud & AI Spend Forecast Calculator
Project your annualized run-rate, 12-month spend, and the month you cross your budget from your current spend and an expected growth rate.
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.
Reference
Cloud & 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.
ReferenceThe AWS Bill Decoder
50 real AWS usage-type codes — NatGateway-Bytes, DataTransfer-Regional-Bytes, CW:MetricMonitorUsage — decoded into what they mean, why they spike, and how to cut them.
OverviewSolutions
A categorized directory of every connector CostMon monitors today — cloud, AI & LLM, data platforms, and dev tools — with deep-dive guides for AWS, GCP, Azure, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
ProductFeatures
What's included in every plan — connectors, normalization, alerts, and reporting.
ProductSecurity
The access model, credential handling, and data practices behind every connector.
From the blog
See all posts →Catching Runaway Spend Before the Invoice
The four-week invoice lag problem, leading vs. lagging cost indicators, what to monitor daily, and how normalization makes real alerting possible.
AI costsWhat Does Your AI Actually Cost?
Token pricing, input vs. output, caching, model selection, and batch processing — why AI spend is invisible in most FinOps tools, and how to see it.
Cloud costsCut AWS Costs Without Slowing Down Engineering
Rightsizing, orphaned resources, savings plans, storage tiering, and egress — the practical AWS cost levers that don't cost you velocity.
See what your stack really costs.
Connect your first providers in minutes and give finance and engineering one number they both trust. Flat pricing — never a percentage of your bill or your savings.