Cloud cost tracking

What you’ll build: a daily spend dashboard — today’s total with a trend, plus a breakdown by service — fed by a job that reads your cloud billing API. Catch cost spikes before the invoice does.

pulsedeck.app / dashboards / cost

SCREENSHOT

Finished cost dashboard: a total-spend metric, a 30-day spend chart, and a by-service table.

Drop an image into public/shots/ and pass src.

What you’ll need

PulseDeck running (Quickstart).
A registered source and its pd_… API key.
Access to your cost data (AWS Cost Explorer, GCP Billing, a provider export).

1. Plan the structure

Category: cost
Stream: daily (or one stream per cloud account/project)

2. Send the report

A daily job posts a metric for total spend, a chart for the trend, and a table breaking spend down by service. Add an alert when spend crosses a threshold you set.

curl -X POST http://localhost:3001/api/v1/reports \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer pd_xxxxx" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: cost-2026-06-23" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d @cost.json

{
  "version": "1.0",
  "source": { "id": "src_…" },
  "category": { "slug": "cost" },
  "stream": { "slug": "daily" },
  "report": {
    "title": "Cloud spend — 2026-06-23",
    "summary": "Spend up 18% — compute spike.",
    "severity": "warning",
    "occurred_at": "2026-06-23T05:00:00Z",
    "tags": ["cost"]
  },
  "blocks": [
    {
      "id": "total", "type": "metric",
      "key": "spend", "label": "Spend (today)", "value": 412.5,
      "unit": "USD", "format": "currency", "precision": 2,
      "trend": "up", "sentiment": "negative", "delta": 63, "comparison_label": "vs yesterday"
    },
    {
      "id": "trend", "type": "chart", "variant": "area",
      "title": "Daily spend",
      "labels": ["Mon", "Tue", "Wed", "Thu", "Fri"],
      "unit": "USD",
      "series": [{ "name": "Spend", "data": [340, 355, 360, 349, 412] }]
    },
    {
      "id": "by-service", "type": "table",
      "title": "By service",
      "columns": [
        { "key": "service", "label": "Service", "type": "string" },
        { "key": "cost", "label": "Cost", "type": "number", "unit": "USD" }
      ],
      "rows": [
        { "service": "Compute", "cost": 268.0 },
        { "service": "Storage", "cost": 96.5 },
        { "service": "Egress", "cost": 48.0 }
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "spike", "type": "alert",
      "title": "Spend above daily budget", "severity": "warning",
      "message": "Compute is 18% over the $350/day budget."
    }
  ]
}

3. Build the dashboard

A metric widget for total spend.
A chart widget for the 30-day trend.
An alert_feed on the cost category for budget breaches.

{
  "version": 1,
  "widgets": [
    { "id": "t", "type": "metric", "span": "third", "row": 0,
      "config": { "streamId": "str_daily", "metricKey": "spend", "label": "Spend (today)" } },
    { "id": "tr", "type": "chart", "span": "half", "row": 0,
      "config": { "streamId": "str_daily", "metricKey": "spend", "variant": "area", "range": "30d" } },
    { "id": "al", "type": "alert_feed", "span": "full", "row": 1,
      "config": { "categoryId": "cat_cost", "limit": 10 } }
  ]
}

pulsedeck.app / dashboards / cost / edit

SCREENSHOT

Builder with a spend metric, a trend chart, and a budget-alert feed.

Drop an image into public/shots/ and pass src.

Make it your own

Per account/project — one stream each under cost; compare them side by side.
Per client (agencies) — bill-back reporting: each client’s cloud spend in their own workspace.
Threshold alerts — only emit the alert block when spend crosses budget, so the feed stays signal.