Estimated vs. invoiced cost
Most cost figures in Plutus come straight from a provider’s own billing API — an invoiced number you could reconcile line-by-line against your bill. A smaller set of figures are estimated: computed from usage data against a rate card, because the provider’s billing API doesn’t publish a real dollar figure for that source, or for that particular breakdown of an otherwise-invoiced source.
Estimated figures carry a visible “Estimated” badge next to the number in the Cost Explorer
breakdown table, and an equivalent cost_basis field (estimated_from_static_rates vs.
invoiced) on every row the MCP query_costs tool returns — so an assistant summarizing spend
knows which numbers to qualify, without a human having to remember which sources are which.
Two ways a figure ends up estimated
Section titled “Two ways a figure ends up estimated”A source has no billing API at all. Providers like HuggingFace, Paperspace, LambdaLabs, and Fireworks AI either don’t publish invoiced cost, or publish it too late to be useful — so Plutus prices their usage against a maintained rate card instead. Every dollar figure from these sources is estimated, not just one breakdown of them.
A source is invoiced overall, but one breakdown isn’t. Anthropic publishes a real invoiced Cost Report — daily spend by model, and real per-workspace spend — but has no per-API-key cost endpoint. Plutus prices each key’s real token counts against a published per-model rate card to produce a dollar figure for the Identity breakdown, while the Account and Model breakdowns next to it stay exactly invoiced. Switching the breakdown dimension can switch a number from invoiced to estimated and back, for the same account, same source, same date range — see Anthropic for the specifics.
Rate cards are kept current, not fixed at connector build time
Section titled “Rate cards are kept current, not fixed at connector build time”Rate cards for every estimated source are checked weekly against a third-party pricing reference and fail a scheduled workflow if they drift, rather than going stale silently the way a hand-maintained constant would. A model or SKU with no rate-card entry yet has its usage counted but left unpriced, rather than guessed at — an estimate that’s honestly incomplete is safer than one that’s confidently wrong.
Budgets and alerts
Section titled “Budgets and alerts”Enforcement (budgets, spend limits, anomaly detection) reads whichever cost figure the row actually carries — an estimated figure is a real number, not a placeholder, and is summed the same way an invoiced one is. There’s no separate “exclude estimated spend” mode.