finops: 0.1
info:
  title: Viam FinOps
  description: |
    FinOps alignment for Viam — covers the billing surface, cost telemetry, and chargeback
    primitives exposed by the Viam Billing API. Maps to FinOps Framework capabilities
    (Inform, Optimize, Operate) and the FOCUS data spec where applicable.
  source: https://docs.viam.com/manage/manage/billing/
  modified: '2026-05-25'
inform:
  cost-allocation:
    description: Per-organization, per-location, and per-machine cost attribution.
    primitives:
      - GetCurrentMonthUsage (org-level current month usage)
      - GetInvoicesSummary (historical invoices)
      - GetInvoicePdf (invoice line items)
      - Location billing organization assignment (per-location chargeback)
    focusFields:
      - BilledCost
      - EffectiveCost
      - InvoiceIssuer
      - ServiceCategory
      - ServiceName
      - ResourceId
      - ResourceName
      - Tags
  cost-categorization:
    description: Cost classes documented on the Viam pricing page.
    classes:
      - Standard tabular/JSON storage ($0.25/GB-month)
      - Hot data store storage ($2.50/GB)
      - Hot data store compute ($0.00125/second)
      - Non-tabular storage ($0.05/GB-month)
      - Cloud data upload ($0.15/GB)
      - Cloud data egress ($0.25/GB)
      - Standard compute ($0.0025/second)
      - Trigger notifications ($2.50/1M)
optimize:
  rightsizing:
    description: Tune capture cadence and data resolution to reduce storage and egress spend.
    levers:
      - Reduce per-component capture frequency where possible
      - Down-sample images on-device before sync (Vision Service preprocessing modules)
      - Prefer Data Pipelines to pre-aggregate before query
      - Use GetDatabaseConnection for analytics instead of egressing through the Data API
      - Delete tabular data older than N days via DeleteTabularData
      - Move bulk training data to dataset snapshots, not continuous capture
  workload-placement:
    description: Choose edge vs cloud for ML inference.
    levers:
      - Run inference at the edge via ML Model Service (no per-call cloud cost)
      - Reserve cloud ML Inference for low-frequency, high-compute workloads
      - Schedule training jobs in off-peak windows to leverage best-effort capacity
operate:
  budgeting:
    description: Set budget guardrails per organization.
    primitives:
      - SendPaymentRequiredEmail when projected spend exceeds threshold
      - UpdateOrganizationBillingTier to move organizations onto custom contracts
  chargeback:
    description: Bill end-customers via the Billing API.
    primitives:
      - GetAvailableBillingTiers (your custom tier catalog)
      - UpdateOrganizationBillingTier (assign customer to a tier)
      - UpdateLocationBillingOrganization (cross-org chargeback)
      - ChargeOrganization (one-off charges)
      - CreateInvoiceAndChargeImmediately (invoice + collect)
  alerting:
    description: Trigger notifications from data pipelines / data triggers.
    note: Triggers are billed at $2.50 per 1M notifications.
chargebackModel:
  description: |
    Viam's Billing API is unusual: it lets a Viam customer become a billing provider for its
    own end-customers. A machine deployed at a customer site can be billed back at custom
    per-machine, per-data, or per-API-call rates. This makes Viam a natural fit for OEMs
    embedding robotics into a product sold as a service.