Cloudflare launches Billable Usage API for programmatic cost tracking

Cloudflare has introduced a new API designed to give customers programmatic visibility into their spending across the company’s usage-based services. The Billable Usage API provides structured cost and usage data for self-serve accounts, allowing teams to monitor expenses in near real-time rather than waiting for monthly invoices or manual exports from the dashboard.

What the API provides

The API offers a single endpoint that returns usage and cost data broken down by product and billing period. It covers all usage-based Cloudflare services, including Workers, R2 storage, D1 databases, Workers AI, Vectorize, Images, and Stream. Each response includes fields such as service name, charge period, consumed quantity, unit of measure, and cost in the account’s billing currency. The data is updated daily, with plans to introduce more real-time updates for certain products in the future.

The API’s structure aligns with the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS), a standard adopted by major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. While Cloudflare’s implementation does not yet claim full FOCUS conformance—missing a few required columns—it maps most fields directly to the specification, making it easier for teams already using FOCUS-compatible tools to integrate Cloudflare data alongside other providers.

Integration and use cases

Cloudflare has partnered with Vantage, an infrastructure cost management platform, to provide native integration for customers. Vantage ingests cost and usage data from over 30 providers, allowing teams to view Cloudflare spending alongside AWS, Azure, and other cloud services in a unified dashboard. The integration supports workflows such as cross-provider cost allocation, anomaly detection, and querying via FinOps agents or multi-cloud platforms (MCP) like Claude or ChatGPT.

To connect Cloudflare to Vantage, users generate a read-only API token with billing access and authorize the platform to pull data daily. Once configured, Vantage breaks down Cloudflare costs by product, zone, and account, enabling teams to attribute spending to specific projects or teams. The integration eliminates the need for manual exports or separate dashboards, streamlining cost monitoring across multiple providers.

Why this matters for operators

The API addresses a growing need for programmatic cost visibility, particularly as automation and AI agents increasingly provision infrastructure on behalf of users. Without real-time access to spending data, teams risk unexpected costs from automated deployments or misconfigured resources. The ability to pull usage data via API allows finance and engineering teams to build custom monitoring tools, set up automated alerts, or feed data into existing FinOps pipelines.

What’s next

Cloudflare plans to expand the API’s capabilities in several areas. Finer-grained time windows, such as hourly breakdowns for certain products, are under consideration. The company also intends to add forecasting features to help customers predict end-of-billing-cycle costs at both the account and product levels. Additionally, support for Enterprise contracts is in development, though the current release is limited to self-serve accounts.

The API is available now for all self-serve Cloudflare accounts. Users can access it by generating an API token with Billing Read permissions and querying the endpoint directly or through Vantage’s integration.