Let customers read the cost they are incurring now.
Open Cost Read API is a small, read-only profile for SaaS, AI, infrastructure, and developer-tool billing. It gives customers live cost visibility without granting access to deployments, data, billing changes, or payment methods.
{
"cost_account_id": "acct_123",
"billing_currency": "USD",
"period_start": "2026-08-01T00:00:00Z",
"period_end": "2026-08-21T00:00:00Z",
"cost_status": "estimated",
"billed_cost": "37.37",
"updated_at": "2026-08-17T13:45:00Z",
"items": [
{
"charge_period_start": "2026-08-17T00:00:00Z",
"charge_period_end": "2026-08-18T00:00:00Z",
"service_name": "Build",
"resource_id": "project_abc",
"billed_cost": "6.20"
}
]
}Production evidence
The technical review surface is live.
- Application
- Production service and public status checks
- Recovery gate
- R2 credential activation and a current-canary restore drill are pending
- Account security
- Passkeys, step-up confirmation, and session revocation
- Notifications
- Production sign-in delivery verified through Proton SMTP
Reference path
One connection. Two useful surfaces.
The provider remains the source of truth. Vibe Costs normalizes only the customer-authorized cost facts, then serves the same ledger to a human dashboard and a permissioned agent API.
- 01Provider ledgerCurrent incurred cost, credits, status, and freshness
- 02Customer authorizationProvider-hosted OAuth with a costs:read grant
- 03Vibe Costs ledgerNormalized totals and attribution; no raw provider payload archive
- 04Human + agent viewsDashboard, budgets, reconciliation, and one read-only API/MCP surface
Minimum contract
One safe grant. One honest ledger.
Providers can begin with a total, currency, status, and freshness timestamp. Detailed services and resources can follow without changing the authorization model.
- 01Authorization
- OAuth authorization code + PKCE; costs:read is the only resource permission
- 02Ledger
- Current-period incurred cost—not the eventual card transaction
- 03Freshness
- An explicit updated_at timestamp and estimated/final status
- 04Amounts
- Decimal strings, invoice-basis billed cost, signed credits preserved
- 05Attribution
- Service, project, resource, and usage detail when available
01 / PREFERRED
Provider-hosted OAuth
The customer signs in on the provider’s domain and selects the account to share. Vibe Costs never receives the password.
02 / TRANSITIONAL
Restricted token
When OAuth is unavailable, a revocable token carrying only cost-read permission provides a safe migration path.
03 / SEMANTICS
FOCUS-mapped
The profile uses FOCUS names only where their semantics match. Billed cost remains distinct from optional, amortized EffectiveCost.
Why provider-side cost
Payment data arrives too late.
A settled card charge says who collected money. It cannot explain what is accruing today, which service caused it, which project owns it, or whether a credit will apply.
The provider’s cost ledger already knows. This proposal gives the customer a safe way to authorize that specific read—without exposing production control.
Review our security approach, open the implementation guide, or send the OpenAPI description directly to an API owner.