Preparing this Costframe view
Preparing this Costframe viewPRODUCT ARCHITECTURE
Costframe connects to Azure read-only, normalizes daily cost data, detects cloud waste, prices findings at configured net rates, and keeps follow-up savings review tied to provider billing data.
Seven steps from connection to action review. Each one leaves an audit trail your engineering and finance teams can check.
Closed-loop workflow
The public product story now follows the same loop the app is designed around: no unsupported claims, no hidden write access, and no savings declared without evidence.
Detect waste from provider cost, inventory, and utilization signals.
Attach Evidence Ledger entries, freshness, missing signals, and price math.
Route the finding to the owning team with provider scope and resource context.
Generate reviewable guidance, tickets, or artifacts while provider writes stay outside Costframe.
Compare follow-up cost syncs with the expected net-rate savings.
Export executive and technical summaries with assumptions and evidence intact.
Evidence Ledger
The Evidence Ledger story mirrors the app: what was checked, what was missing, and who must approve the action.
Evidence checked
CPU history, cost line item, resource state, SKU catalog reference
Evidence unavailable
Missing metric windows, unsupported provider fields, stale billing exports
Decision state
Confidence, contradiction checks, owner, approval status, verification plan
Create a Service Principal with Reader and Cost Management Reader roles. You restrict the scope to specific subscriptions; Azure's security model enforces it.
Costframe ingests daily ActualCost records, resource inventory, and tags into one normalized ledger per organization. One queryable source of truth.
Detector families evaluate utilization over time and resource state to catch idle and oversized compute, stopped-but-billing VMs, unattached disks, unused public IPs, and more.
Savings are quoted at your net rate. Costframe applies your organization discount and the weekly-synced Azure Retail Prices catalog, not generic retail estimates.
Findings carry the available utilization, inventory, and price references behind the recommendation. Engineers review with the same evidence state Costframe used.
Each finding states the recommended change and your team executes it. Costframe holds no write access, so every change stays in your hands.
Resolved findings can be reviewed against the daily cost sync, so realized-savings checks stay tied to provider billing data rather than a model-only estimate.
Interactive product walkthroughs
These walkthroughs are product-operating-model explainers. They do not replace real screenshots, and they do not imply provider-write capability.
Engineer and finance reviewer
Open finding
Inspect checked signals
Review missing evidence
Approve or reject action
Proof shown
Checked evidence, unavailable signals, freshness, confidence, owner, and approval state.
Boundary
A missing provider signal lowers confidence instead of being hidden.
Interactive architecture diagrams
Hover, focus, or tap a diagram. Motion is restrained and respects reduced-motion settings.
Billing, inventory, metrics, and recommendation APIs are used only where configured and permitted.
Authenticated product
These are direct captures of the authenticated Costframe interface in its verified no-customer-data state. They contain no invented tenant, savings, testimonial, or certification claims.
Optional access, capability boundaries, recovery guidance, and verification stay visible together.
Financial impact, evidence confidence, and unavailable data are kept distinct.
Recommendations are ranked for review without pretending Costframe changed a provider.
Modeled impact stays a planning draft, kept separate from identified or verified savings.
No black-box recommendations. Each finding reads like a verification sheet: the CPU baseline, the current and recommended SKU, and the catalog price reference behind the savings number.
Findings cite CPU utilization from Azure Monitor, so an oversized VM is proven by its own history, not guessed from its size.
Findings carry their resource group and tags, so the owning team can pick them up without a hunt through the portal.
Cost Explorer · Illustrative Savings Model
Generic optimization tools quote savings at Azure retail list prices. If you have an Enterprise Agreement or partner discount, those numbers are wrong for you.
Costframe applies your organization discount to quote each recommendation at the post-discount rate you are actually invoiced. The list price is shown alongside, never counted twice.
You can get a rough one-off estimate that way, but not a number finance will sign off on. A general AI assistant prices against public provider list rates rather than your negotiated net rate, has no verified utilization data behind its claims, and would need ongoing access to your production tenant to stay current. Costframe attaches available resource context, evidence state, and pricing assumptions to findings, prices at configured net rates, and keeps realized-savings review tied to provider cost data.
Compare Costframe with general AI assistants →
# acceptable scopes (read-only)
Reader
Cost Management Reader
# rejected scopes (contributor)
Owner, Contributor, or write access
# cryptography standards
AES-256-GCM · stored encrypted at rest
Decrypted strictly inside isolated worker nodes04 · TRUST BOUNDARIES
Costframe requests least-privilege read roles. The provider clients contain no write paths, so no person or process on our platform can deploy, shut down, modify, or delete a resource in your tenant.
Read the security architecture →Read-only trust boundary
Read APIs, billing exports, inventory, metrics
Org-scoped records, evidence freshness, detector inputs
Checked signals, missing signals, confidence, price math
Tickets, reports, and guidance leave Costframe for human approval
Grant Reader and Cost Management Reader, run the first audit, and review the findings with engineering and finance at the same table.