OpenCost is an open-source tool for monitoring and allocating Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure costs. It provides real-time visibility into spending by distributing asset costs to workloads based on resource requests and usage, breaking down spend by namespace, deployment, pod, and label. The system functions as both a Kubernetes cost allocation engine and a multi-cloud cost analyzer, ingesting billing data from AWS, Azure, and GCP to present unified cost metrics alongside cluster costs.
The tool distinguishes itself through its allocation-based cost model, which compares requested versus used resources to distribute infrastructure costs to Kubernetes workloads. It integrates directly with cloud provider billing APIs to fetch dynamic pricing for accurate resource valuation, and supports custom pricing for on-premises environments through CSV imports. OpenCost also offers a Model Context Protocol server that exposes cost and allocation data for programmatic querying by AI agents and automation tools, alongside a REST API and kubectl plugin for traditional integration and command-line access.
The platform provides multiple ways to visualize and export cost data, including pre-built Grafana dashboards, an interactive web dashboard, and export pipelines to CSV and Parquet formats. It tracks historical cost trends, calculates idle costs, distributes shared costs across tenants, and reports estimated carbon footprints for cloud resources. Deployment is managed through a Helm chart with configurable storage, Prometheus, and cloud provider settings, and the system can connect to existing Prometheus-compatible stores for metrics ingestion.