Overview of Cost Organization with Dimensions
Dimensions are how you turn raw spend into business context. CloudZero lets you see your cloud, SaaS, and AI platform costs broken down by team, product, environment, customer, or any category your business cares about, across every connected provider. You define the categories. CloudZero calls them Dimensions. Once defined, they work across the platform, including the Explorer, Dashboards, Views, Budgets, and the AI Hub.
CloudZero builds Dimensions from metadata already in your bill, such as accounts, services, regions, and usage types. You do not need clean resource tags to get started. Tags are optional enrichment, not a prerequisite. Dimensions can also normalize inconsistent tag variations (such as env, ENV, and Environment) into a single category, so you do not need perfect tag hygiene across your organization.
Changes are retroactive. When you create or update a Dimension, CloudZero applies it across your full cost history. You see results within a few minutes.
Common Dimensions
Most organizations start with a few Dimensions that answer their most common cost questions:
| Dimension | Example elements | Question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Environment | Production, Staging, Development | How much are we spending on production vs. non-production? |
| Team | Platform, Data Engineering, Mobile | What does each team cost us? |
| Business Unit | Engineering, Finance, Marketing | How does spend break down across the organization? |
| Product | Mobile App, API Platform, Admin Portal | What does it cost to run each product? |
| Customer | Acme Corp, Globex, Initech | What is our cost to serve each customer? |
You can create as many Dimensions as you need. Dimensions are not limited to these examples.
Three ways to organize costs
CloudZero supports three approaches. Most organizations use a combination.
| Approach | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Categorize from metadata | Group costs using attributes already in your cost data, like account names, services, regions, or tags. | Create an Environment Dimension that groups accounts into Production, Staging, and Development. |
| Split shared costs by proportion | Distribute shared infrastructure costs across teams or products based on their existing cloud spend. No additional data required. | A shared database costs $10,000/month. Three teams use it. CloudZero splits the cost based on each team's share of related spend. |
| Split shared costs by usage | Allocate shared costs based on actual consumption data you send to CloudZero, like API calls, storage per customer, or query counts. | An API gateway serves three customers. CloudZero splits the cost based on each customer's request volume. |
Two ways to build Dimensions
You can build Dimensions using a visual editor or by writing YAML. Both produce the same result.
| Path | Best for | Get started |
|---|---|---|
| Dimension Studio (visual editor) | Point, click, publish. Build Dimensions in the browser without writing any code. | Allocate Visually with Dimension Studio |
| CostFormation (YAML) | Write rules as code, version control your definitions, and automate with the API. | Allocate through YAML with CostFormation |
Dimension Studio includes a built-in Code Editor for YAML, so you can use both approaches within the same interface. To learn the process of building your first Dimension, see How to Build a Dimension.
Manage Dimensions at scale
As your organization grows, these tools help you manage Dimensions across teams:
- Namespaces: Separate Dimension definitions by team or project, with independent version history and access control.
- VS Code Extension: Author, validate, and publish CostFormation definitions from your editor with autocompletion and inline validation.
Have questions or feedback? Reach out to your account manager.
Updated about 2 hours ago