Build unit costs
Divide cost by a business metric, such as customers, requests, or tokens, to get a number teams can own.
A unit cost is cloud cost divided by a business metric: cost per customer, per transaction, per query, or per thousand tokens. Unit costs show efficiency, and they stay meaningful as the business grows.
Step by step
Pick the metric
Choose a metric that drives cost and that the business cares about, such as monthly active customers, API requests, or tokens processed.
Bring it in as a dataset
Connect a source that holds the metric, such as Customer usage events in S3, Revenue by customer in Postgres, or Query volume in Prometheus. Map its date column, and its team or account column if the metric is per team.
Allocate the cost
Make sure the cost you're dividing is allocated to the same scope, such as the team that serves those requests. See Allocate cost to teams.
Build the widget
In the widget builder, use Cloud cost as the source, filter to the scope, and join the dataset. Or ask Iris: Cost per active customer by month, this year.
Use amortized cost
Use the Amortized cost type for unit costs. With billed cost, a commitment renewal makes one month's unit cost jump even though nothing changed.
Examples
| Unit cost | Cost | Metric |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per transaction | Payments team, amortized | Transactions processed |
| Cost per customer | All production, amortized | Monthly active customers |
| Cost per 1K tokens | Bedrock, OpenAI, and Anthropic | Tokens from token_usage |
| Cost per query | Search team | Queries from Prometheus |