name: NASA CMR FinOps
description: >
  Financial operations guidance for NASA Common Metadata Repository (CMR) APIs.
  CMR is a free public service operated by NASA/EOSDIS under a U.S. government
  mandate for open Earth science data access. There are no fees for consumers
  searching or discovering metadata, nor for authorized providers ingesting
  metadata records.
url: https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/about/esdis/eosdis/cmr

cost:
  model: free
  currency: USD
  notes: >
    All CMR APIs — Search, Ingest, Access Control, GraphQL, STAC, and
    OpenSearch — are provided at no charge. NASA funds CMR operations as
    part of the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS).
    There are no per-request charges, subscription fees, or overage penalties
    for any tier of access.

considerations:

  - category: Earthdata Login (EDL) Registration
    description: >
      Registering for an EDL account at urs.earthdata.nasa.gov is free and
      requires only a name and email address. The resulting Bearer Token
      unlocks access to restricted collections and, with provider authorization,
      metadata ingest capabilities. Tokens expire after 30 days and must be
      renewed at no cost.

  - category: Data Access (Downstream)
    description: >
      CMR provides metadata only; actual Earth science data files reside at
      NASA DAACs (Distributed Active Archive Centers) and, increasingly, in
      AWS S3 buckets via NASA Earthdata Cloud. Downloading granule files may
      incur egress charges on a requester-pays basis depending on the DAAC
      and S3 access method used. CMR metadata discovery itself is always free.

  - category: Self-Hosted / Mirror Deployments
    description: >
      CMR is open-source (github.com/nasa/Common-Metadata-Repository).
      Organizations operating their own CMR instance — for testing or
      air-gapped environments — are responsible for their own infrastructure
      costs (compute, storage, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, network egress).

  - category: STAC API Cloud Costs
    description: >
      CMR-CLOUDSTAC surfaces only cloud-hosted granule assets (S3). When
      applications retrieve STAC items and then access the underlying S3 data,
      standard AWS egress and request pricing applies to the data transfer.
      The STAC API query itself is free.

  - category: Provider Ingest Infrastructure
    description: >
      Data providers ingesting metadata into CMR via the Ingest API incur no
      CMR-side charges. Providers are responsible for their own systems used
      to generate and transmit UMM-format metadata records.

optimization:
  - tip: >
      Use CMR-Search-After header for stateless deep paging rather than
      deprecated scroll sessions; this avoids holding server-side state
      and reduces the risk of throttling on long-running harvests.
  - tip: >
      Request only the fields you need via the fields parameter to reduce
      response payload size and improve throughput on large bulk harvests.
  - tip: >
      Use POST instead of GET for complex spatial queries; this avoids
      URL length limits and allows richer query expressions without encoding overhead.
  - tip: >
      Cache provider and collection-level responses where appropriate; CMR
      collection metadata changes infrequently compared to granule-level records.
  - tip: >
      Include a Client-Id header in all requests so NASA can identify your
      traffic pattern and proactively assist if throttling occurs during
      high-volume operations.
  - tip: >
      Use the CMR STAC or GraphQL APIs for applications that benefit from
      standardized interfaces; this reduces custom parsing and integration costs.