name: Arize Phoenix FinOps Framework
description: >
  FinOps cost management profile for Arize Phoenix API usage following the
  FinOps Foundation FOCUS specification. Covers cost allocation, optimization
  strategies, and unit economics for teams using the Arize AX managed cloud
  service or self-hosted Phoenix deployments.
specificationVersion: '1.0'
url: https://arize.com/pricing/
framework: FinOps Foundation FOCUS 1.0

costModel:
  billingDimensions:
    - dimension: TraceSpans
      description: Number of individual spans ingested into the Phoenix platform per month.
      unit: spans
      metricName: trace_spans_ingested
      aggregationPeriod: monthly

    - dimension: DataIngestion
      description: Volume of trace and telemetry data ingested in gigabytes per month.
      unit: GB
      metricName: data_ingestion_gb
      aggregationPeriod: monthly

    - dimension: DataRetention
      description: Number of days trace and span data is retained in the platform.
      unit: days
      metricName: retention_days
      aggregationPeriod: monthly

    - dimension: UserSeats
      description: >
        Number of user accounts on managed AX plans. Enterprise contracts may
        price per-seat for larger organizations.
      unit: users
      metricName: active_users
      aggregationPeriod: monthly

tiers:
  - tier: AX Free
    monthlyBasePrice: 0.00
    currency: USD
    includedSpans: 25000
    includedIngestionGB: 1
    retentionDays: 15
    costPerAdditionalSpan: 0
    costPerAdditionalGB: 0
    overageAllowed: false

  - tier: AX Pro
    monthlyBasePrice: 50.00
    currency: USD
    includedSpans: 50000
    includedIngestionGB: 10
    retentionDays: 30
    costPerAdditionalSpan: 0.0008
    costPerAdditionalGB: 3.00
    overageAllowed: true

  - tier: AX Enterprise
    monthlyBasePrice: custom
    currency: USD
    includedSpans: custom
    includedIngestionGB: custom
    retentionDays: custom
    costPerAdditionalSpan: custom
    costPerAdditionalGB: custom
    overageAllowed: custom

  - tier: Open Source (Self-Hosted)
    monthlyBasePrice: 0.00
    currency: USD
    includedSpans: unlimited
    includedIngestionGB: unlimited
    retentionDays: unlimited
    infrastructureCost: external
    notes: >
      Self-hosted deployments have no Arize licensing cost but incur compute,
      storage, and network infrastructure costs on the hosting provider.

unitEconomics:
  - metric: CostPerSpan
    description: Total monthly platform cost divided by total spans ingested.
    formula: "total_monthly_cost / total_spans_ingested"
    unit: USD/span
    targetBenchmark: "<$0.001 per span"

  - metric: CostPerGB
    description: Total monthly platform cost divided by total data ingested in GB.
    formula: "total_monthly_cost / total_data_ingestion_gb"
    unit: USD/GB
    targetBenchmark: "<$3.00 per GB on Pro"

  - metric: SpanUtilizationRate
    description: Percentage of included monthly spans actually consumed.
    formula: "spans_used / included_spans * 100"
    unit: percent
    targetBenchmark: "70-90% to justify plan tier"

optimization:
  recommendations:
    - id: right-size-plan
      title: Right-Size Plan Tier
      description: >
        Monitor monthly span consumption and ingestion volume. Upgrade from
        Free to Pro when approaching 80% of the 25k span limit. Evaluate
        Enterprise when Pro overage charges consistently exceed $100/month.
      action: Monitor utilization and adjust plan quarterly.

    - id: sampling-strategy
      title: Implement Trace Sampling
      description: >
        Use OpenTelemetry head-based or tail-based sampling to reduce span
        volume. Sampling at 10-50% can significantly reduce monthly costs while
        maintaining visibility into error rates and latency distributions.
      action: Configure OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER and OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER_ARG.

    - id: self-host-at-scale
      title: Self-Host for High Volume
      description: >
        At high span volumes (>500k/month), self-hosting Phoenix on cloud
        infrastructure (e.g., AWS ECS, GCP Cloud Run, Kubernetes) may be more
        cost-effective than managed AX Enterprise pricing.
      action: >
        Evaluate infrastructure cost of self-hosted deployment vs. AX Enterprise
        contract pricing when monthly managed cost exceeds $500.

    - id: retention-optimization
      title: Optimize Retention Settings
      description: >
        Tune data retention periods to match compliance and debugging needs.
        Longer retention increases storage costs in self-hosted deployments and
        may influence Enterprise contract pricing.
      action: Set retention to match the minimum required for incident investigation.

    - id: tag-cost-allocation
      title: Tag Spans for Cost Allocation
      description: >
        Use OpenTelemetry resource attributes and span attributes to tag traces
        by team, application, model, or environment. This enables accurate
        chargeback and showback reporting by business unit.
      action: >
        Add attributes like service.name, deployment.environment, team.name to
        OTEL resource configuration.

allocation:
  - strategy: ByProject
    description: Allocate span costs to Phoenix projects (mapped to application or team).
    method: spans_per_project / total_spans * monthly_cost

  - strategy: ByEnvironment
    description: Separate cost tracking for production, staging, and development traces.
    method: Filter by deployment.environment attribute on spans.

  - strategy: ByModel
    description: Track observability costs per LLM model being monitored.
    method: Filter by gen_ai.system and gen_ai.request.model span attributes.