Professional AWS cost management in your terminal — Lightning-fast cost visibility, optimization, and governance.
Transform complex AWS billing into clear, actionable insights — all from your command line.
FinOps Lite is a Python-based CLI tool designed to simplify AWS cost management for small teams and enterprises. By providing clear cost insights, tag governance, and optimization recommendations, it empowers FinOps practitioners to reduce cloud waste and improve financial accountability. Built with performance and user experience in mind, it's a practical solution for modern cloud cost challenges.
Cloud cost management is often complex and overwhelming, especially for small teams or organizations new to FinOps. FinOps Lite was born out of a desire to simplify AWS cost visibility and optimization, empowering teams to make data-driven decisions without enterprise-grade complexity. This project reflects my passion for bridging technical and financial domains to drive cloud efficiency.
Monthly cost totals with automatic fallback
Performance metrics and caching details
Structured output for automation and reporting
$ AWS_PROFILE=finops-lite finops-lite
💰 AWS Cost Summary
Month-to-Date Total: $1,247.83
(Data from Dec 1-15, 2024)
$ AWS_PROFILE=finops-lite finops-lite --last-month
💰 AWS Cost Summary
Last Month Total: $2,156.92
(Data from Nov 1-30, 2024)
$ AWS_PROFILE=finops-lite finops-lite services --days 30 --top 5
🔍 Top Services (Last 30 Days)
1. EC2-Instance: $892.45
2. Amazon RDS Service: $234.12
3. Amazon Simple Storage Service: $89.23
4. CloudWatch: $31.04
5. NatGateway: $28.67# Install and run
git clone https://github.com/dianuhs/finops-lite.git
cd finops-lite
pip install -e .
finops-lite --dry-run cost overview$ finops-lite cost overview╭────────────────────── Cost Summary ──────────────────────╮
│ │
│ Period: Last 30 days │
│ Total Cost: $2,847.23 │
│ Daily Average: $94.91 │
│ Trend: ↗ +12.3% vs previous period │
│ Currency: USD │
│ │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯
Top AWS Services
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━┓
┃ Service ┃ Cost ┃ % of Total ┃ Trend ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━┩
│ Amazon EC2 │ $1,234.56 │ 43.4% │ ↗ │
│ Amazon RDS │ $543.21 │ 19.1% │ ↘ │
│ Amazon S3 │ $321.45 │ 11.3% │ → │
│ AWS Lambda │ $198.76 │ 7.0% │ ↘ │
│ CloudWatch │ $87.65 │ 3.1% │ ↗ │
└────────────┴───────────┴────────────┴───────┘
$ finops-lite cache stats Cache Statistics
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━┓
┃ Metric ┃ Value ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━┩
│ Cache Entries │ 12 │
│ Cache Size │ 0.3MB │
│ Hit Rate │ 67% │
│ API Calls Saved │ 23 │
│ Est. Cost Savings │ $0.23 │
│ Cache Hits │ 23 │
│ Cache Misses │ 11 │
└───────────────────┴───────┘
Good cache performance! Your repeated queries are much faster.
- Lightning Fast — Intelligent caching saves time and money on repeated queries
- Beautiful Output — Rich tables, charts, and progress bars that actually look good
- Bulletproof Errors — Helpful guidance when things go wrong (not cryptic AWS errors)
- Cost Aware — Tracks and minimizes your API costs while maximizing insights
- Professional Grade — Enterprise-ready reliability with comprehensive testing
AWS Cost Explorer API: ~$0.01 per call. FinOps Lite includes intelligent caching to minimize costs.
Required IAM Permissions: Read-only access with
ce:GetCostAndUsage,ce:GetRightsizingRecommendation. See detailed permissions below.
Startup Cost Control
A small team uses finops-lite cost overview --days 7 to monitor weekly AWS spending and identifies a 25% cost spike due to untagged EC2 instances running in non-production environments.
Enterprise Tag Governance
A FinOps analyst runs finops-lite tags compliance --export compliance-report.csv to generate executive reports, ensuring 95% tag coverage across resources for accurate cost allocation.
Developer Cost Awareness
A DevOps engineer uses finops-lite optimize rightsizing --savings-threshold 50 to find underutilized EC2 instances, identifying $800/month in potential savings through rightsizing recommendations.
Monthly Executive Reporting
A cloud architect exports finops-lite cost overview --format executive --export monthly-summary.json to create stakeholder-friendly cost summaries with trend analysis and optimization opportunities.
- Month-to-date totals with intelligent fallback to last month
- Cost by service breakdown with trend analysis
- Multiple output formats (table, JSON, CSV, YAML, executive summary)
- Smart caching to avoid duplicate API calls
- Tag compliance reporting across all resources
- Cost impact analysis for untagged resources
- Bulk tagging recommendations (coming soon)
- EC2 rightsizing recommendations with confidence scores
- Reserved Instance opportunity analysis
- Unused resource detection (coming soon)
- Trend alerts for cost spikes
- Intelligent caching saves money on API calls
- Performance tracking with detailed metrics
- Cache management commands for full control
- Cost savings reporting (tracks money saved from caching)
git clone https://github.com/dianuhs/finops-lite.git
cd finops-lite
pip install -e .# Create AWS profile (recommended)
aws configure --profile finops-lite
# Enable Cost Explorer in AWS Console
# Go to: AWS Cost Management → Cost Explorer → Enable
# Test installation
finops-lite --help# Basic cost overview
finops-lite cost overview
# Check cache performance
finops-lite cache stats
# Export to JSON
finops-lite cost overview --format json --export report.json
# Performance tracking
finops-lite --performance cost overview# Different time periods
finops-lite cost overview --days 7
finops-lite cost overview --days 90
# Force refresh (bypass cache)
finops-lite cost overview --force-refresh
# Executive summary format
finops-lite cost overview --format executive# Check cache performance
finops-lite cache stats
# Clear cache
finops-lite cache clear
# Disable cache for one command
finops-lite --no-cache cost overview# Beautiful terminal tables (default)
finops-lite cost overview
# Machine-readable formats
finops-lite cost overview --format json
finops-lite cost overview --format csv
finops-lite cost overview --format yaml- Python 3.9+
- AWS CLI configured with appropriate credentials
- AWS Cost Explorer enabled (may take 24-48 hours for first-time setup)
Create a read-only IAM user with these policies:
ReadOnlyAccess(AWS managed policy)- Custom policy for Cost Explorer:
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"ce:GetCostAndUsage",
"ce:GetRightsizingRecommendation",
"ce:GetReservationCoverage",
"ce:GetUsageReport"
],
"Resource": "*"
}
]
}FinOps Lite provides helpful guidance when things go wrong:
$ finops-lite cost overview
╭──────────────────────── AWS Credentials ────────────────────────╮
│ AWS Credentials Not Found │
│ │
│ Quick Fixes: │
│ 1. Configure AWS CLI: │
│ aws configure │
│ │
│ 2. Use named profile: │
│ export AWS_PROFILE=your-profile-name │
│ # or use: finops-lite --profile your-profile-name │
│ │
│ 3. Use environment variables: │
│ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=your-key │
│ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=your-secret │
│ │
│ Cost Note: Cost Explorer API calls cost ~$0.01 each │
╰─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯Now:
- ✅ Cost overview with caching
- ✅ Multiple output formats
- ✅ Professional error handling
Next:
- Real AWS Cost Explorer integration
- Tag compliance automation
- Enhanced rightsizing analysis
Later:
- Multi-account support
- Budget tracking and forecasting
- Real-time cost alerts
See open issues for detailed progress.
# Clone repository
git clone https://github.com/dianuhs/finops-lite.git
cd finops-lite
# Install development dependencies
pip install -e .[dev]
# Run tests
pytest
# Check code quality
black finops_lite/
flake8 finops_lite/Contributions welcome! Please read our contributing guidelines and submit PRs.
MIT License - see LICENSE file for details.
- Bug reports: GitHub Issues
- Feature requests: GitHub Discussions
Built with care for cloud cost optim 6E73 ization
FinOps Lite helps teams understand and optimize their AWS spending without the complexity of enterprise tools.