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CostGraph reports each customer’s attributed cloud spend to your billing platform every night. You decide which customer each charge belongs to with a virtual tag. The platform prices and invoices what CostGraph reports. This is your customers’ billing. It has nothing to do with how you pay CostGraph.

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How the export works

  1. A virtual tag assigns each charge to a customer. Every value the tag produces is an id in your billing platform.
  2. A meter binds that tag key to one meter in the platform. Each night CostGraph reports every customer’s spend for each settled day to that meter.
  3. The platform prices and invoices what was reported.
CostGraph reports spend in integer cents. Price the meter per cent, or divide by 100 on the platform. No platform checks the unit, so a price set as if the values were dollars bills 100 times too much.

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Platform differences

The platforms disagree on what they bill and how they treat corrections. The following table shows what each one expects; the platform pages cover the details. Where a platform creates an unknown id, a mistyped tag value becomes a new billable customer. Where it accepts one silently, the spend is reported but not invoiced. Check the tag’s values against the platform before you bind a meter, and review the first night’s report after any rule change.

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Tag spend by customer

Create a virtual tag key with the platform’s prefix, such as stripe_customer. Only prefixed keys can be bound to a meter. The value a rule assigns is the id the spend is reported under, so set the Tag value to the customer’s id in the platform. The following rule bills everything in one linked account to one customer: Any field works as the match: a linked account, a resource name prefix, a project, or an existing tag. CostGraph doesn’t report spend the tag doesn’t match. See Virtual tags for the rule builder and how overlapping rules resolve. Group the cost overview by the tag key to see what each customer is billed before it’s reported.

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Protected days

A bound tag key drives invoices, so CostGraph protects days it has already reported. Rules on the key can’t be reordered. A new or edited rule must start on a date that hasn’t been reported yet. To retire a rule, give it an end date instead of editing it in place.

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Nightly runs

Cloud providers restate recent spend. CostGraph holds each day for two days before reporting it, then keeps reconciling the last 35 days. A day that changes after it was reported is sent again as a correction. Each run reports only what changed, so an unchanged day sends nothing. Every report carries the same reconciliation fields. They let you explain any charge from the platform’s side: CostGraph holds a day back rather than report it wrong when its spend mixes currencies or a quantity meter meets an unexpected unit. Each held day is recorded with its reason. Deactivating a meter stops reporting but keeps its history. Reactivating it resumes from what was already sent, so the window isn’t billed twice.