How to measure cost per unit

To turn a cost group’s spend into a rate, tell CloudMonitor what that cost group produces and how much of it there was each month. Cost is already known; the quantity is the half you supply.

Open Cost Allocation ▸ Cost Groups, choose the group, and go to its Unit economics tab.

Step 1: Choose the quantity

Add quantity offers a choice of routes, and the first one is worth reading before you skip it:

Use a quantity already defined attaches something another cost group is already tracking. Both groups then share one set of monthly values: you type the number once, and each group divides its own cost into it.
Create a new quantity starts a fresh one.

Reach for the existing one whenever the number is genuinely the same number. Three teams each creating their own “Monthly active users” gives you three figures that drift apart and cannot be compared, and nothing in CloudMonitor will warn you that they were meant to match.

Step 2: Name it, and name one unit of it

The name is yours. One unit is called is the word every label on the screen is built from, so it is singular and lower case: order gives Cost per order, customer gives Cost per customer. The form previews the tile as you type: you should never find out what your labels read like after saving.

Pick something that grows as the cost group does more work. A staleness figure, a success rate or an uptime percentage are all real measures, but a cost divided by one is a confident number that means nothing.

Report the rate per exists for quantities where one unit costs a fraction of a cent. Reporting per 1,000 gives you $0.40 per 1,000 instead of $0.0004, which is the difference between a figure someone can act on and a row of zeroes.

What kind of number is A count of things or A money amount. Money quantities produce percentages: cloud cost as a share of revenue, and the margin after it, and use your workspace reporting currency, with no conversion.

If the quantity should also apply to other cost groups you own, tick them under Also used by.

CloudMonitor works out whether your months can be added together and states it back to you in plain words. Orders add up across a quarter; active users do not, because the same person appears in every month. Correct it inline if the inference is wrong for your business: the link to do so sits next to the sentence.

Step 3: Enter the months

Add value gives you the last twelve completed months as one form, saved as a single write. Fill in what you have.

Do the backfill now rather than starting from this month. One data point is not a trend, and “is this getting better or worse” is the whole reason for the screen. A year of history on day one is what makes the first visit useful.

Re-entering a month replaces what was there rather than adding a second value, and the change is recorded in the audit trail with the figure it replaced. If a month is genuinely unknown, leave it empty: an empty month reads No value and is skipped, which is honest. A guess is not.

Step 4: Read it

The headline names the month it answers for: the latest completed month that has a value. The current month appears with its cost and quantity but no rate, marked In progress, because a whole month’s quantity over a part-month of cost reads far too cheap.

If the cost group tracks several quantities, choose which one leads from the row menu.

What to expect afterwards

The rate is an average across the whole cost group for that month, not the price of one more unit. Most cloud cost does not move with a single order. Use it to watch a team’s efficiency over time; do not use it to price a customer.

If the quantity is shared, changing its definition or its values needs ownership of every cost group it feeds, so somebody else may have to make the change, and CloudMonitor will name the groups you are missing.

Unit Economics: the roll-up across every cost group, and the rules that keep a rate honest
Inside a cost group
How to create a cost group: cost has to reach the group before a rate means anything