Getting started
leancosts is a hosted product. There is nothing to install — you work entirely in the web app at app.leancosts.com. This page gets you from sign-in to real cost data.
Regulated customers — banks, insurers, and teams with data-sovereignty requirements — can run leancosts on-premise or in their own private cloud, entirely inside their environment. That is the Sovereign plan and it is sales-led: talk to us to set it up.
leancosts is read-only by construction: connecting a cloud account grants read access only. The product never creates, changes, or deletes a resource in your cloud — every recommendation is handed to you as a guided CLI kit you review and run yourself.
1. Sign in
Section titled “1. Sign in”Open app.leancosts.com and sign in with your work email. leancosts emails you a one-time magic link — no password to manage. If your organization has single sign-on configured, use the SSO button instead.
- Invited by a colleague? Open the invitation link from your email; it signs you in and adds you to their organization automatically.
- Switching organizations? If you belong to more than one, use the organization switcher in the top bar.
2. Land on the Savings Register
Section titled “2. Land on the Savings Register”After sign-in you land on the Savings Register — your team’s daily decision surface and the home of leancosts. It is the shared, dated record of what to do next: open optimization findings, cost anomalies worth a look, and the savings already in flight, all on one audit trail.
Two things sit beside it in the Start group of the sidebar:
- Copilot — ask about your costs in plain English and get an answer with an audit trace. It cites its sources; it does not guess.
- The Search button (or Ctrl/⌘ + K) opens the command palette to jump to any page.
3. Connect your cloud
Section titled “3. Connect your cloud”When you are ready for real numbers, connect a read-only cloud account:
- Go to Admin → Connections and pick your cloud (Azure, AWS, or GCP).
- Follow the connector wizard. The first healthy connection kicks off zero-config auto-discovery — subscriptions/accounts, resources, tags, and 13 months of cost history land within minutes.
The full step-by-step lives in Connect a cloud account.
4. How the app is organized
Section titled “4. How the app is organized”The sidebar follows the FinOps lifecycle. Non-technical roles see plain-language group names (shown in parentheses):
| Group | Plain name | What lives here |
|---|---|---|
| Start | — | Savings Register, Copilot |
| Inform & Plan | Where your money goes | Costs, Variance, Allocation, Commitments |
| Optimize | Save money | Hunters (the savings finder) |
| Operate | Take action | Change Requests, Savings (realized-savings ledger) |
| Govern | Set up & control | Tagging, Admin, Global Admin |
Some settings-grade rows are hidden from a new tenant’s sidebar by default. Click Show advanced at the bottom of the sidebar to reveal them — nothing is locked, and every page is also reachable from the command palette.
Where to go next
Section titled “Where to go next”Task-oriented walkthroughs:
- Connect a cloud account — ingest a real Azure / AWS / GCP estate, read-only.
- Act on a cost finding — turn a hunter finding into an executed, audited saving.
- Set up tag governance — define a taxonomy that drives allocation, coverage, and cost insights.
- Configure alerts & digests — get notified when cost behaviour changes.
- Set up single sign-on (OIDC) — let your team sign in through your own Keycloak / OIDC identity provider.
- Use the API with a token — call the HTTP API from a script or CI job.