Docs Using Kumo.io
Using Kumo.io
Cost
Each workspace has a Cost tab that totals what your resources cost, splits it by provider, service and owner, and, on the Business plan, finds waste, recommends savings and forecasts the next 30 days. Kumo.io estimates cost from price catalogs and, once you connect an AWS Cost and Usage Report, uses your billed actuals.
Where the numbers come from
Kumo.io keeps two kinds of cost apart, and labels which is which:
- Estimated (Priced): Kumo.io matches each resource to a price list and estimates what it costs. Only resources Kumo.io can price are included.
- Actual (Billed): what your provider actually billed, read from an AWS Cost and Usage Report you connect (see below).
Total (Best Available) uses actuals where Kumo.io has them and estimates elsewhere. Next to it, Kumo.io shows how reliable the total is, based on how much of the spend is billed actuals rather than estimates.
The Cost tab
Open a workspace and choose Cost, then set the date range. The tab shows:
- Summary: Total (Best Available), Actual (Billed), Estimated (Priced) and Est. Monthly Waste.
- Trend: a chart of cost over the selected window.
- Breakdown: cost grouped by provider, service and owner, with Actual, Estimated and Share columns.
- Waste findings: each with Severity, Finding, Confidence, Status, Est. Monthly Waste and Why. Findings link to the resource they're about.
- Savings Recommendations, a 30-Day Forecast, and Cost Allocation rules that split shared cost.
If a window hasn't been analysed yet, the tab says so rather than showing an empty result, and waste findings aren't available for it either. A workspace with no synced revision can't be analysed at all.
Some resources are priced by how much they are used rather than by what they are. For AWS Lambda functions, Kumo.io reads each function's invocations and duration from CloudWatch for the selected window, using the same AWS connection as the sync, and prices them at the function's own rate (Arm functions at the Arm rate). This needs cloudwatch:GetMetricData on the connection's role. AWS's ReadOnlyAccess already includes it, and so does Kumo.io's least-privilege policy. Without it, functions show no estimate, and the analysis says which account lacks the permission. For a window that hasn't finished, Kumo.io scales the usage measured so far to the whole window. For a future window, it uses the same length of recent usage.
If your resources are synced but no pricing data has been loaded, the tab says so: cost figures appear once a price catalog or billing export is ingested. On a self-hosted installation, your administrator loads price catalogs (for example with kumo aws pricing, kumo azure pricing or kumo gcp pricing).
Connect your AWS bill
To see billed actuals, point Kumo.io at the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) the account delivers to S3. Do this on each AWS source:
- Open the source's page and find its Cost Reporting panel.
- Choose Set Up Cost Reporting. If Kumo.io has already found exports the source's credentials can see, pick one under Cost Export and choose Use this export.
- Otherwise, enter the S3 Bucket (just the bucket name, not an ARN or an
s3://URL), the Report Name exactly as AWS has it, an optional Path Prefix (Optional), and the Bucket Region.
Kumo.io checks every AWS account for cost exports daily. Use Check Again to ask now. Kumo.io reads the configured report on a schedule; Ingest Now queues a read straight away, and the cost analysis refreshes when the new figures arrive.
In an AWS organization, the Cost and Usage Report lives in the account that pays the bill and covers every member account. If you try to set up cost reporting on a member account's source, Kumo.io stops you with Cost Reporting Belongs on Another Account and names the paying account. Set it up on that account's source instead. Until a source has cost reporting, its spend is estimated from the inventory.
Billed actuals come from AWS only. Azure, Google Cloud and Kubernetes resources use estimates.
Cost on resources and diagrams
- A resource's page has a Cost section showing what it costs and how Kumo.io priced it. See How do I find a resource?
- On a diagram, open Layers and turn on Cost to tint nodes by the last 30 days of spend, with a chip per node. It covers priced resources only. See How do I read, edit and customise a diagram?
Who can see money
Cost figures are filtered by role. If your role isn't allowed to see billed actuals, those values show as restricted. That means your role can't see them, not that the data is missing. Setting up cost reporting needs a role that can manage cost ingestion.
From the CLI
kumo cost summary --workspace <id> [--last 30d | --month 2026-06 | --from <iso> --to <iso>] [--currency USD]
kumo cost breakdown --workspace <id> [--by provider,service,owner] [window]
kumo cost explain <resource-id> --workspace <id> [window]
kumo cost waste --workspace <id> [--kinds <list>] [--severities <list>] [--statuses <list>] [--limit <n>]
kumo cost recommendations --workspace <id> [--kinds <list>] [--statuses <list>] [--limit <n>]
kumo cost forecast --workspace <id> [--next 30d]
kumo cost billing-export list --workspace <id>cost summary, cost waste, cost recommendations and cost forecast also work against kumo.io from your own machine with an API token. The other cost commands run on a self-hosted installation. See the CLI reference.
Which plans include cost
| Plan | What's included |
|---|---|
| Team | The summary, breakdown and trend, resource cost, the diagram cost overlay, and AWS cost reporting. |
| Business and Enterprise | Everything in Team, plus waste findings, savings recommendations, the forecast, cost allocation and cost reports. |
On Team, the Cost tab shows a lock in place of savings recommendations, the forecast and cost allocation, which explains why and opens the plan options.
| Enterprise (Licensed) (self-hosted) | Everything in Business. |
|---|