finops plane · the crew

CostCrew. A crew of agents works your bill, and a person signs off every line.

Analysts with named missions, budgets and owners take the cloud, SaaS and AI bill apart: allocation, chargeback, unit economics, anomalies and forecasts. Each one is hired into a desk, given a mandate and a monthly guard, and the work it does arrives as a draft. Nothing is published until a person stamps it, and this console enforces nothing at all: it watches spend, it does not spend, and it cannot stop anything.

See the console ↓ GitHub

statuspre-1.0 · main is supported

coreGo · one static binary

storeSQLite, in a directory you name

readsAWS, GCP, Azure, Kubecost, vendor usage APIs

enforcesnothing, by design

licenceApache-2.0

the console, twelve frames

A FinOps practice, staffed.

Every frame below is a fresh installation of the binary on its own seeded estate: nineteen thousand charge rows over fourteen months, thirty-nine analysts, twenty sprints. Click any still to open it full screen. The figures are the fixture's, and the console says on each page which of its numbers are real money and which the estate generated.

01-03 of 12

CostCrew board — **The board**Blocked and returned work sits first on purpose: it is the work that has stopped, and a board that buries it hides its own problems.

CostCrew crew roster — **The crew**Thirty-nine analysts, 3,871.35 of work across 310 tasks, and a first-pass rate left blank where nothing has been reviewed yet, because a rate over no reviews is not a rate.

CostCrew analyst card — **One analyst**Its desk and mission, one open task of the four it has ever been given, what it posted, and 66.72 of work against a 150.00 monthly guard.

CostCrew hire form — **Hiring**Everything the form asks is a governance fact, asked once. The name becomes part of an agent:// identity that other services parse.

CostCrew anomalies queue — **Anomalies**Every irregularity ranked by money rather than by how far out it sits, 2,475.10 of it still unexplained. A four sigma move worth three dollars is real and is not worth your morning.

CostCrew one anomaly — **One finding**2,054.10 above baseline on Amazon EC2, the day marked on its own series, and the rule that judged it: 3.5 robust deviations from the median of the last 28 comparable days.

CostCrew allocation — **Allocation**The part of the bill that arrived with nobody's name on it: 136,848.58 direct against 14,540.00 shared, placed by rules a team can argue with rather than by a number it must accept.

CostCrew chargeback — **Chargeback**Closing a period is what stops the numbers moving, because an allocation recomputed every time somebody opens the page cannot be charged to anybody. Out as a general ledger CSV.

CostCrew results — **Results**Found, never saved. 1,254.35 found since the board opened against 3,871.35 the crew cost, and the word is load-bearing: nothing is saved until somebody acts.

CostCrew KPI library — **KPIs**Nine report a number and three refuse. The refusals are the important part: a library where everything reports is one where several of the figures are invented.

CostCrew connectors — **Connectors**Every entry says which table it fills, what it needs, and whether running it costs money, because that last one is what decides whether an integration is a good idea.

CostCrew audit chain — **Audit**Everything the console did, in order, each entry hashed against the one before it. Tamper-evidence rather than tamper-proofing, and the page says which one it is.

twelve frames, one fresh installation, click any still to open it full screen

how the work moves

A finding becomes a task, a task becomes a draft, a person stamps it.

The detector is two-sided and ranks by money: a fall matters as much as a rise, because a feed that stopped delivering and a workload switched off unnoticed both look like a drop. A Sunday is judged against Sundays, and the baseline is a median with a robust deviation, so last month's spike does not raise the bar for this month's.

The finding names its rule

Every anomaly carries the rule that judged it, the baseline it was judged against and the day marked on its own series. A queue whose entries cannot be argued with is a queue nobody works.

The task carries a guard

An analyst gets the task with a mandate, the rights that come with its skills and a spend guard on the row. What it may read follows from what it was hired to do, not from what is convenient.

Only a person publishes

Work comes back as a draft. A person posts it or returns it, and the return is on the analyst's own card next to its first-pass rate, so a crew that produces confident noise is visible rather than merely busy.

the part finance argues about

Found, never saved.

One word is load-bearing throughout this console: money is found, never saved, because nothing is saved until somebody acts. A console that reports found money as saved is one whose numbers stop being believed the first time finance checks them against the invoice.

Shared cost gets a defensible owner

Direct cost needs no product. This is about the part of the bill that arrived with nobody's name on it, placed by a rule a team can read and dispute rather than a figure it must accept.

Closing a period stops the numbers

An allocation recomputed every time somebody opens the page cannot be charged to anybody: March's number is not April's, and the team is right to refuse it. A closed period freezes, and leaves as a general ledger CSV.

A measure that cannot be computed refuses

The KPI library reports a number or says by name why it cannot. A practice that measures itself with invented figures is worse off than one that measures nothing.

where it sits

Genaryx governs agents. This is a crew of agents that works your bill.

They are floors, not alternatives. Genaryx is the control room over a fleet: it watches what is running now, demands a signature for anything destructive, and stops things. CostCrew's analysts are agents like any other, so Genaryx governs them too. This console runs the other way round: it reads last month's invoices, hands you drafts, and stops nothing. It emits its own work onto the same agent-event bus, so Trailryx can seal it and Heraldyx can mail you about it.

Runtime is not the ledger

TokenFuse counts a run in micro-dollars while it happens and can kill it. CostCrew counts an invoice line in cents a month later and allocates it. Same money, two questions, and only one of them has a kill switch.

Hiring is registration

The hire form collects what a Passport needs, so an analyst joins the crew and the estate in one act. In the original, those were two unrelated steps and the second one mostly did not happen.

It says what it cannot do

Per-agent attribution of AI spend is not possible from an invoice: the charge carries a model and a workload, not an agent. It becomes possible when the calls go through TokenFuse, and until then the console does not pretend.

run it

One binary, one directory.

No interpreter, no virtual environment, no second database engine in the process. It listens on loopback by default and expects a proxy in front of it for TLS. First account created at /signup becomes the admin of that installation, so make one before you hand anybody the address.

go install github.com/TAIPANBOX/costcrew/cmd/costcrew@latest then: costcrew -data ./local

./up.sh --with-finops the whole local stack with the console on :8321, from TAIPANBOX/stack-up

261 tests, and the repository gates more than the suite: every scenario written in the language of the request is bound to a named test in both directions, and each gate has a case that plants its own fault and requires the gate to go red.

common questions

What a crew of agents can and cannot do to your bill

Do the agents change anything in my cloud account?

No. This console reads billing exports and vendor usage APIs and writes only its own database. It has no credentials that can act, it makes no outbound call while serving a page, and it enforces nothing: every deliverable is a draft until a person stamps it.

How is this different from the console that kills runs?

Different question, different clock. Genaryx and TokenFuse work in micro-dollars while a run is happening and can stop it. CostCrew works in cents on last month's invoice and allocates it. The crew here are agents like any other, so Genaryx governs them too.

What does it do about anomalies nobody has time for?

It ranks them by money rather than by how far out they sit, and it looks both ways: a fall matters as much as a rise, because a feed that stopped delivering looks exactly like a drop. A four sigma move worth three dollars is real, true, and not worth anybody's morning.

Can it tell me what each AI agent cost?

Not from an invoice. A charge carries a model and a workload, not an agent, and the console says so rather than inventing an attribution. Route the calls through TokenFuse with an agent id and the same page answers per agent.

What does it cost to run?

Nothing to us and nothing to a vendor: one Apache-2.0 binary on a box you already have. What can cost money is a connector, so every entry says whether running it is metered per call, because that is the fact that decides whether an integration is a good idea.