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New to Costory? Read the Welcome page for how the product fits DevOps workflows, then follow the steps below.
Example of weekly cost reporting message sent by Costory
Here’s what you can expect in 30 minutes (and a large lunch break):
  • Set up your 14-day free trial with your cloud billing data connected.
  • Get a unified view of your costs across teams, providers, and environments.
  • Receive your first Costory report directly to your team’s inbox (Slack, Teams, Email).

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Prerequisites for Costory cloud cost management setup

  • Cloud Billing Admin Access: Be a Billing Admin on your cloud provider account. If you’re a marketplace admin, you can also purchase Costory directly from the marketplace at the end of onboarding.
  • Slack or Teams App Install: Have your Slack or Teams admin ready to install the Costory app, or ensure you have admin permissions to do it yourself.

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Step 1: Connect your AWS, GCP, Azure billing accounts (10 minutes)

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Create your Costory Account: 1 minute

Sign up for Costory

Request a free trial
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Connect your cloud billing data: 10 minutes

Go to Setup Billing Datasources
Setup AWS CUR using CloudFormation
If you have an existing export, you will be able to import it directly in Costory.
If you need to create a new report, AWS takes between 6 and 12 hours to export the first file. And 12-24 hours to backfill the historical data. Costory will ping you when your data is ready.
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Wait for your data to be ingested: (from 10 minutes to 24 hours depending on your luck but mostly on your provider...)

Costory will ingest your data and make it available. Depending on your provider, the first export may take from 10 minutes (GCP, Azure) to several hours (AWS).

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Step 2: Automate your cloud cost reporting (20 minutes)

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Normalize and Map Multi-Cloud Labels: Costory automatically finds your best labels: 5 minutes

Costory will read your existing labels across providers, suggest merges and mappings to standardize keys and values.Going from 3 labels: env, environment, k8s_label_env with many different values to a single label: environment, with only 3 values: development, staging, production.You can review those in the feature engineering page, and add more transformations to your labels:
Feature Engineering UI with an environment example labels env, k8s_label_env
Feature engineering allows you to keep a clean explorer with only the meaningful labels / values. It will also help our AI assistant Billy to better understand your data and keep its explanations clear and actionable.
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Verify Billing Data: 5 minutes

Explore the cost using Last Month date preset, or Last invoice month (uses invoice date instead of usage dates).
Using Costory explorer you have a unified view of your costs across all providers and standard columns
Check that the amounts are correct. You need to trust the data before building reports on top of it.A few useful docs to help you:
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Deploy FinOps Dashboards & Alerts: 10 minutes

Start from battle-tested dashboards instead of building from scratch.Costory templates cover the most common FinOps scenarios. Choose the ones that fit your needs, and Costory will also suggest relevant ones for you.
Costory provides pre-built dashboards for your most common use cases
With the dashboards you can:
  • Check your Kubernetes costs, waste…
  • Check your EC2 and savings plan coverage, network costs…
  • Check your savings.
  • and more.
Alerts Templates: Be alerted when:
  • The cost of your R&D environment is above your production costs.
  • The data scientists started two VMs with huge GPU during the week-end.
  • Reserved instances are not fully used.
  • Your savings plan no longer covers 50% of your costs.
  • A mandatory tag is no longer attached to most of your costs.
  • Your K8S waste ratio is above 75%.
Costory provides pre-built alerts for K8S, savings plan, network costs etc...
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Automate Slack and Teams Cost Reports: Share costs with your team: 5 minutes

To automate and have your team responsible for cloud costs you need to give them visibility on the costs.Share a weekly and a monthly report with your team via Slack / Teams or email. You can share any view:
Example of weekly cost reporting message sent by Costory
Connect easily with your team. We support:
Go to Integrations
Process to setup Slack integration
Congratulations, you’re set up 🎉

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Next Steps

Here’s what most of our customers do in their first week:

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Need help?

We’re here to help. Reach out to us at support@costory.io or by Intercom in the bottom right corner of the app.
Last modified on March 20, 2026