Cost amounts
Every total in Costfluent is a sum over the same cost records. What changes between two totals is which amount is summed and which charge categories are counted. A cost report stores those choices, so reopening it shows the same total. You set them under Presentation in the explorer.
Billed or effective cost
Each cost record carries two amounts:
- Billed cost is what the provider charges on the invoice for that line. An upfront commitment appears in full on the day it is bought.
- Effective cost spreads commitments such as reserved instances and savings plans over the usage they cover, so a day's cost reflects what that day's usage really cost.
Amortized cost sums effective cost instead of billed cost. It is on by default. Turn it off to reconcile a report against the provider's invoice.
Charge categories
Every record has a charge category from the FOCUS specification: Usage, Purchase, Tax, Credit or Adjustment. Usage and purchases are always counted. The other three are switches:
| Setting | Counts | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Include credits | Credit lines, such as promotional credits | Off |
| Include refunds | Refunds and corrections (the Adjustment category) | On |
| Include tax | Tax lines | On |
Group a report by Charge category to see how much each category contributes.
Currency
A record keeps the currency it was billed in. A workspace either converts every amount into one currency at a published European Central Bank rate, or shows each billing currency side by side. An amount with no published rate for its date is left out of the total and named beside it rather than guessed. See Currency settings.
Forecast
Show forecast adds a projection to a report's chart. The forecast is a straight line fitted through the last 90 days of daily cost for each connection, projected forward with a range that widens the worse the line fits. A connection with less than two weeks of history gets no forecast at all, rather than a projection built on too little data. A forecast is an estimate of where spend is heading, not a commitment of future cost.
Missing data is not zero
Costfluent never shows zero where it does not know the amount:
- Days your plan's cost history does not reach are cut from the range, and the explorer says so.
- Days not collected yet, for example while automatic syncing is off, fill in on the next collection.
- A budget whose spend has not been computed yet shows "Spend not computed yet".
- An amount that cannot be converted is excluded from a converted total and listed separately.