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. It’s an enterprise/contract option and 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.

Open app.leancosts.com. leancosts is passwordless — there is no password to manage. You have three ways in:

Passkey — the fastest, and it needs no email. Sign in instantly with Face ID, Touch ID, or Windows Hello (or a hardware security key). Once you’re in for the first time, accept the Set up a passkey prompt — after that, signing in is one tap and works even if email is unavailable.
Magic link — enter your work email and leancosts sends you a one-time sign-in link. Click it and you’re in.
Single sign-on (SSO) — if your organization has SSO configured, use the SSO button to sign in through your own identity provider.
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 Opportunities

After sign-in you land on Opportunities — 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

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

The sidebar follows the FinOps lifecycle. Non-technical roles see plain-language group names (shown in parentheses):

Group	Plain name	What lives here
Start	—	Opportunities, 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

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.

Stuck on any of these? Use Contact support in the app (top bar) to reach the team directly.