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Not every cost increase is a problem. More customers, higher traffic, and new workloads all raise cloud spend. That nuance is usually lost when finance reviews the bill. Engineering needs to show that costs grew because the business grew, not because something broke. Costory imports business and usage metrics into the same interface as your cloud cost data, then lets you define formulas to track over time.

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Prerequisites

  • Your cloud billing data is connected to Costory (see Quickstart).
  • You have access to a business or usage metric (e.g., active users, API calls, transactions) from one of the supported sources: Datadog, BigQuery, Parquet, CSV, or Google Sheets.

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What you get

  • Usage metrics imported alongside your cloud cost data.
  • Custom unit economics formulas (cost per user, cost per request, cost per transaction, etc.) visualized over time.
  • Evidence that cost increases track with business growth, ready to share with finance and leadership.

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How to track unit economics step by step

1

Import a usage metric

Bring in the usage data that matters to your business from any supported source:
  • Datadog: Import metrics directly from your monitoring stack
  • Data warehouses: BigQuery, Parquet, CSV imports
  • Custom sources: Spreadsheets, Google Sheets, or APIs for business metrics
See Usage & Metrics setup for connection details.
Unit Economics

Usage metrics imported alongside cloud cost data

2

Define a unit economics formula

Once the metric is imported, define a formula in Explorer to track the KPIs that matter:
  • Cost per active customer: track infrastructure efficiency per user
  • Storage cost per document: monitor storage efficiency at the resource level
  • Lambda cost per OCR job: measure serverless cost per operation
  • Any custom KPI: define metrics specific to your business
These metrics can be visualized over time and scoped by team, product, or region.
The Costory MCP can assemble the view for you: “build a cost-per-active-customer chart over the last 6 months and save it to a dashboard.”
3

Share unit economics with stakeholders

Use the resulting charts to show finance that your cost per user is going down even as total spend goes up.

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Next steps

Last modified on June 30, 2026