Prevent · Cloud & AI Cost Guardrails

Know the cost before it ships.

Cost Guardrails reads the infrastructure change in your pull request, prices it against a live rate card, and hands the answer back to your pipeline, while the change is still a proposal.

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How it works

Code
Pull request
CI
Deploy
Production
Cost Guardrails reads the change before anything is provisioned
PricedEvery resource costed against a live cloud catalog.
CheckedAgainst the budget that owns it, and the headroom left.
DecidedPass, route to the owner, or deny. All logged.

Your pipeline acts on the decision: hard-block or warn-and-proceed, whichever you configure.

1

The change gets priced

  • Reads the Terraform, CloudFormation or Helm change itself
  • Projects a monthly figure per resource from a live pricing catalog
  • Actual instance type, region and hours, not a rough estimate
2

Your budget policy decides

  • Projection measured against the budget that owns the scope
  • Within headroom: passes straight through
  • Over: warn or deny, routed to the budget owner
3

Your pipeline acts on it

  • SKYXOPS returns a decision; your pipeline acts on it
  • Hard block, warn and proceed, or require an override
  • Every override leaves an audit trail

What a priced change looks like

The result comes back as structured output your pipeline can act on, and as a readable summary for whoever has to approve it.

  • Projected monthly cost and the delta against current spend
  • Remaining headroom on the budget the change touches
  • The approver it routed to, and why that person
  • A cheaper alternative when one exists, with the saving quantified
Cost Guardrails check result returned to a CI/CD pipeline: projected monthly cost, budget headroom, approval routing and a cheaper-instance recommendation.

Reads the infrastructure you actually write

Cost Guardrails works on the change itself, not on a separate description of it that drifts out of date.

  • Terraform: plan output and module changes
  • CloudFormation: stack and change-set diffs
  • Kubernetes and Helm: workload and node-pool changes
  • Per-resource projection from a live rate card, not a static table
Three infrastructure-as-code changes, a Terraform plan, a CloudFormation change set and a Helm chart, flow into Cost Guardrails and come out as a per-resource monthly price with a projected total.

Fits the pipeline you already run

There is no new console for engineers to learn. The check runs where their work already runs, and the result appears where they already look.

  • GitHub, GitLab and Azure DevOps
  • A CLI for local runs before a change is even pushed
  • A REST API when you need the check somewhere else
  • Returns a decision to the caller. SKYXOPS writes nothing to your repository
A pull request in GitHub, GitLab or Azure DevOps runs the Cost Guardrails check alongside build and tests, and the pass, warn or deny result appears in the pipeline. A CLI covers local runs and a REST API everything else.

Approval goes to whoever owns the money

A cost decision routed to the wrong person is a decision that sits. Rules configured in SKYXOPS send each change to the owner of the budget it touches.

  • Routing by budget scope: team, cost centre, environment, account
  • The approver sees the impact on remaining headroom before deciding
  • Overrides are allowed and recorded, not blocked
  • Approvals go to your people; SKYXOPS never approves anything itself
A change that exceeds headroom is routed by its budget scope to the budget owner, who sees the cost and remaining headroom and approves, denies or overrides, with every decision recorded.

Nested budgets, not one number

A single organisation-wide budget tells nobody anything they can act on. Budgets here nest, so each level sees its own picture and the levels above still add up.

  • Organisation department team project service
  • A budget at any level, with spend rolling up through all of them
  • Separate budgets per environment where production and dev are funded differently
  • Periods that match your finance calendar, not the vendor's
Nested budget hierarchy from organisation down to service, showing how spend rolls up through each level.

Headroom an approver can see

This is the part most budget tools cannot do, because they only see spend after it happens. Headroom here reflects approved-but-not-yet-running commitments.

  • Remaining headroom per scope, updated as approvals are granted
  • The approver sees the impact of the change in front of them before deciding
  • Pending approvals visible so two people cannot spend the same headroom twice
  • Overrides recorded against the budget they affected
A $50,000 quarterly budget split into running spend of $38,000, pending approvals of $6,000, and $6,000 of headroom left to approve against.

Questions about preventing cloud & AI overspend

No. SKYXOPS returns a decision (allow, warn or deny) to your CI/CD pipeline. Your pipeline decides what happens next, and you configure whether a deny is a hard block, a warning, or something that needs an override. The authority stays with you.

No. Cost Guardrails returns its result to whatever called it, usually the pipeline, and records what it priced on the SKYXOPS side. It does not open pull requests, post comments, or change files in your source control.

It prices the specific resources in the change against a live rate card, including region and instance type. It cannot know how much you will actually use a resource, so a projection is a monthly run-rate for what the change provisions, not a usage forecast.

Read access to the infrastructure definitions in the change, and whatever your CI system needs to run a step. It does not need write access to your cloud accounts or your repositories.

Yes. The CLI runs the same check locally, so the cost conversation can happen before the change is ever proposed.