explaingit

strixthekiet/cloudtally

Analysis updated 2026-05-18

3PythonAudience · ops devopsComplexity · 3/5LicenseSetup · easy

TLDR

A command line tool that estimates real-time Google Cloud costs by pricing your live resource inventory instantly, instead of waiting a day for billing exports.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((CloudTally))
    What it does
      Live cost estimate
      Inventory times pricing
      No billing delay
    Tech stack
      Python
      GCP APIs
      SQLite
    Modes
      Demo fleet
      Live GCP account
    Use cases
      Instant VM cost
      Cost history
      Confidence reporting

Code map

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What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Get an instant cost estimate for a newly created VM without waiting for billing data.

USE CASE 2

Watch cloud spend continuously and record a history for later review.

USE CASE 3

Break down costs by project, service, region, or pricing confidence level.

USE CASE 4

Try the reporting workflow in demo mode before connecting a real GCP account.

What is it built with?

PythonGoogle CloudSQLite

How does it compare?

strixthekiet/cloudtally0marildo/imago100/geotwitter
Stars333
LanguagePythonPythonPython
Last pushed2015-09-10
MaintenanceDormant
Setup difficultyeasyeasymoderate
Complexity3/52/53/5
Audienceops devopsgeneralgeneral

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min

Demo mode needs no credentials, live mode requires Google Cloud auth and enabling two APIs.

Use freely for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you keep the copyright notice (MIT license).

In plain English

CloudTally is a command line tool, written in Python, that estimates how much your Google Cloud resources are currently costing you. Most cloud cost tools work by reading billing exports, which usually arrive with a full day of delay through a separate reporting system. CloudTally takes a different approach: it looks at what resources actually exist right now, such as virtual machines, disks, and databases, and multiplies that live inventory against a catalog of Google's list prices, giving you an estimate the moment a resource appears rather than a day later. Out of the box it runs in a demo mode with no setup or cloud credentials needed, simulating a small fleet of resources with realistic price tags so you can try the reporting commands immediately. For real accounts, you log in with Google's command line tool, turn on two required APIs, and CloudTally will then discover every active project your account can see and inventory it automatically, skipping any project it cannot access rather than failing outright. The tool offers several commands: running one inventory and pricing pass, watching continuously and recording history, generating cost reports grouped by service, project, region, or confidence level, listing individual priced resources, viewing a cost history over time, and validating your configuration. Every resource is labeled with a confidence level, ranging from exactly priced to merely estimated to usage based costs that cannot be known from inventory alone, so the tool never silently reports zero cost for something it cannot price. Right now it only supports Google Cloud, though its internal provider interface is designed so that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure support could be added later by implementing the same interface. The project is honest about its limits: it uses public list prices rather than any negotiated discounts, and several resource types such as storage buckets are not fully priced yet. It is released under the MIT license and currently has 3 stars.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Help me set up CloudTally in live mode against my GCP account, including enabling the required APIs.
Prompt 2
Explain what the different confidence levels like exact, estimated, and usage_based mean in CloudTally's output.
Prompt 3
Show me how to generate a cost report grouped by service using CloudTally.
Prompt 4
Walk me through implementing the CloudProvider interface to add AWS support to CloudTally.

Frequently asked questions

What is cloudtally?

A command line tool that estimates real-time Google Cloud costs by pricing your live resource inventory instantly, instead of waiting a day for billing exports.

What language is cloudtally written in?

Mainly Python. The stack also includes Python, Google Cloud, SQLite.

What license does cloudtally use?

Use freely for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you keep the copyright notice (MIT license).

How hard is cloudtally to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated easy, with roughly 5min to a first successful run.

Who is cloudtally for?

Mainly ops devops.

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