Cost forecasting
Projecting future technology spend from usage trends, commitments, and planned workload — not from last month's bill alone.
Updated 2026-04-233 min read
Definition
Cost forecasting is the process of estimating future technology expenditure using historical consumption, committed discounts, known roadmap changes, and scenario modeling — so finance can set budgets IT can defend.
Why it matters
Rolling last month's cloud bill forward assumes nothing changes. Workloads scale, new products launch, and commitments expire. Forecasting ties spend to drivers finance and engineering both understand.
Related Terms
FinOps maturity
How far along an organization is in cloud financial management — from crawl to walk to run across inform, optimize, and operate.
Unit economics
Cost per business unit — per order, per tenant, per active user — so efficiency becomes a trackable engineering outcome.
Cost anomaly detection
Monitoring that flags unexpected spend spikes in near real time — before they land in the month-end close.