Where your cost numbers come from
You'll see two kinds of cost figure across the app — an upfront estimate and your actual bill. They serve different purposes and are not meant to match exactly.
1 min read
How it works
Two figures, two purposes.
- Estimated Cost
- A ballpark monthly cost calculated for each resource from public cloud pricing, so you can spot expensive or wasteful resources right away — even before any bill arrives.
- Actual cost
- Your real, billed spend, imported daily once your cloud provider makes it available. This is what the Costs pages report on.
- Expect a gap
- Discounts, commitments, and usage-based charges mean the two won't line up exactly — the estimate is a signal, the bill is the truth.
Which providers give you real billing data
Not every provider exposes a usage-based bill the same way cloud providers do — some don't have a "bill" of their own to import. The providers below give you real, billed spend on the Costs pages; every provider still gets a cost estimate.
AWS
Cloudflare
DigitalOcean
New Relic
OVH
PostHog
Estimate vs. actual, side by side
| Estimated Cost | Actual cost | |
|---|---|---|
| Answers | "What is this resource roughly costing me?" | "What did I actually get billed?" |
| Available for | Every provider, from day one | Providers marked "Yes" above, once billing data starts flowing in |
| Updates | Whenever a resource is analyzed | Once a day |
| Shown on | Dashboard, FinOps Health score, audit pages | Costs pages |
A small gap between the two is normal — discounts, commitments, and usage-based charges mean an estimate rarely matches a bill to the cent.