Cost Tracking

The Cost & billing page (account menu → Cost & billing) rolls infrastructure spend up across all of your projects and keeps two money streams separate:

• Infrastructure usage — what your AWS account spends on the resources StrictOps runs for you (compute, databases, storage, cache, queues). This is billed by AWS directly to you; StrictOps only reports it.
• StrictOps subscription — the platform fee, billed through Stripe. It never mixes with the infrastructure numbers.

Estimates vs real spend

Until real billing data is available, StrictOps shows indicative estimates derived from a static price table for each resource's type and size. They are clearly labelled, and the Cost page shows a banner instead of real figures.

Real spend comes from AWS Cost Explorer in your own account. Once enabled you get month-to-date actuals, a daily spend trend with a month-end projection, per-project and per-type breakdowns, and month-over-month movers.

The cross-account role you created during AWS Setup already includes the Cost Explorer read permissions StrictOps needs (ce:GetCostAndUsage, ce:GetTags). The only manual step is activating the cost-allocation tags — AWS doesn't allow that to be automated:

Activate the StrictOps cost-allocation tags

Every resource StrictOps provisions is tagged with strictops:project and strictops:resource. AWS ignores tags for billing purposes until you activate them as cost-allocation tags — a manual step AWS only allows from the management (payer) account of your organization.

1. Sign in to the AWS console with the management account.
2. Open Billing → Cost allocation tags.
3. Under User-defined cost allocation tags, find strictops:project and strictops:resource and choose Activate.

Notes on AWS behavior (see the AWS guide to activating tags):

• The tags only appear in that list after tagged resources exist, which can take up to 24 hours from your first deploy.
• Activation itself takes up to 24 hours to propagate.
• Activation is not retroactive — spend that happened before activation stays unattributed, so the numbers fill in from activation day forward.

If your account has never opened Cost Explorer, visiting Cost Explorer once enables it; AWS takes about 24 hours to prepare the data (enabling Cost Explorer).

Freshness and cost of the data

• Cost Explorer data lags roughly 24 hours behind, so the current day is never included and "month to date" means through the last completed UTC day.
• AWS bills per Cost Explorer API request, so StrictOps caches results for 12 hours instead of querying live.
• The YTD view backfills each closed month once and then keeps it permanently — the first YTD request of the year can take a little longer.

Budget

Set a monthly infrastructure budget in Settings → Billing. The Cost page then shows a burn bar against the projected month-end and draws the budget line on the spend trend. The budget is informational — StrictOps never blocks deploys over it.