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Cloudflare Spend Just Got a Whole Lot Easier to Track with the Billable Usage API!

Cloudflare Blog ★★★★ View Markdown
#cloudflare#infrastructure#devops#business

Hey everyone, it's me! Today I want to share a piece of news that looks quiet on the surface but is actually really practical for anyone who cares about cloud costs.

Cloudflare Blog blog.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

According to the Cloudflare Blog, there's a brand-new Billable Usage API available for accounts now. By hitting a single endpoint, you can pull usage and cost data for every one of Cloudflare's usage-based products - Workers, R2, D1, Workers AI, Vectorize, Images, and Stream - broken down by product and billing period. The post makes the philosophy clear: "dashboards are for humans, and they don't automate well." This API is built to fill exactly that gap.

It's also designed around FOCUS (the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification), an industry-standard naming convention. The blog notes that "AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, and a growing list of SaaS providers already publish FOCUS formatted exports," so Cloudflare is joining that trend. That said, it's not full conformance yet - the post is upfront that "a handful of columns the spec requires aren't in the payload today."

The story so far

Before this, tracking Cloudflare costs typically meant screenshotting the dashboard or exporting a CSV and manually pasting numbers into a spreadsheet. Finance and FinOps teams had no unified way to combine Cloudflare's spend with costs from other cloud providers. And developers had no easy way to wire spend data into scripts for automated checks.

What changes

Now, FinOps and finance teams can query the API and pull Cloudflare's cost data in a format that lines up with other cloud providers. This opens the door to things like per-team cost allocation, anomaly detection, and even feeding spend data into AI agent-based FinOps workflows. The blog also highlights an integration with Vantage, which uses a read-only API token with Billing Read access to pull data daily and display Cloudflare spend alongside other cloud providers in the same dashboard.

For developers, being able to track spend programmatically without waiting until month-end is a real win too.

Dive Deep

Here's what the endpoint looks like:

curl https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/$ACCOUNT_ID/billable-usage \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN"

Authentication requires an API token with Billing Read permission, and you can narrow results to a specific date range using the from and to parameters (for example, 2026-02-01 through 2026-02-15).

The response includes FOCUS-aligned fields like ServiceName and ServiceFamilyName (product and family names), ChargePeriodStart/ChargePeriodEnd (billing period), ConsumedQuantity/ConsumedUnit (usage amount and unit), ContractedCost (the charge), and CumulatedContractedCost (cumulative spend). The blog gives a concrete example: 150,000 GB-months of Workers Standard usage costing $0.75.

As for current limitations, usage and cost data are updated daily for now, with real-time data planned for later. This release is also self-serve only - the post explicitly states "an equivalent experience for Enterprise contracts is in the works." Future plans include finer-grained time windows and spend forecasting.

Wrap-up

  • Cloudflare launched a new Billable Usage API for self-serve accounts
  • A single endpoint returns cost and usage data across all usage-based products like Workers, R2, and D1
  • It follows the industry-standard FOCUS spec's naming conventions, though not full conformance yet
  • Data updates daily for now; Enterprise support and real-time data are planned
  • Pairing it with tools like Vantage enables cross-cloud cost management

If you've been wanting to automate spend checks or build out FinOps workflows around Cloudflare, this update is exactly what you've been waiting for!

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