Forge cost

forge-cost: Cost efficiency

Purpose

Tie resource and vendor cost to workloads, ownership, unit economics, budgets, and safe optimization choices.

This is an agent playbook, not a claim of standalone analyzer coverage. Apply

fullstack-forge/references/shared/module-contract.md

for common applicability, evidence, command-safety, mutation, verification, and completion rules.

Never hide failed checks or claim that an operation ran when it did not.

Automatic activation signals

Activate when a request or direct repository evidence involves cost efficiency, when the user explicitly names forge-cost, or when discovery proves an applicable boundary.

• Paid infrastructure, APIs, AI, storage, messaging, or observability

When not to activate

• No material variable or fixed operating cost

Automated support

Relevant discovery inputs are:

• architecture profile
• usage measurements
• pricing and billing exports

Available deterministic support, where present:

• Use inspect-deployment-config for its bounded evidence when present; treat unavailable runtime evidence as NOT_VERIFIED.

Agent inspection procedure

1. Attribute current spend: map each paid service, plan, and resource to the workload that uses it.
2. Identify waste: always-on resources for bursty loads, oversized instances, unused capacity, and orphaned resources.
3. Trace the expensive operations: costly queries, chatty integrations, retry amplification, AI token usage, and egress-heavy paths.
4. Compute unit economics where tenancy exists: cost per tenant or user against plan pricing.
5. Project cost at the stated growth scenario and check budgets, alerts, and retention policies for logs and storage.

Manual inspection requirements:

• Review current provider pricing and contractual commitments
• Validate product value and growth assumptions

Stack-specific guidance:

• Include managed-service minimums, egress, support, and observability costs

Evidence to collect

For formal findings, also follow fullstack-forge/references/PROTOCOL.md. Record the module's inspected boundary, relevant tests, direct observations, and unavailable evidence.

Primary standards used as criteria, not proof of compliance:

• FinOps Framework concepts
• provider billing documentation

Common production failures

• Map cost centers to services, tenants, features, environments, and owners
• Inspect idle resources, retention, egress, log cardinality, build minutes, queries, storage lifecycle, and retry amplification
• Define budgets, anomaly alerts, unit metrics, and cost-performance-reliability tradeoffs

Missing-control checks

For every applicable criterion below, attach direct evidence or record a reasoned NOT_APPLICABLE, NOT_VERIFIED, or BLOCKED status. The list is a routing checklist, not evidence by itself.

• Hosting cost
• Database-plan usage
• Storage growth
• Egress
• AI API usage
• Logging cost
• Monitoring cost
• Always-on services
• Oversized resources
• Inefficient jobs
• Cache cost versus value
• Expensive queries
• Third-party subscriptions
• Per-tenant cost
• Projected cost at scale
• Waste caused by retries
• Large-file storage
• Retention cost

Commands and tools

• Run forge cost audit --json or fullstack-forge cost audit --json when an explicit audit is requested and the CLI is installed. Normal feature work does not require it.
• Use the deterministic support named above only for its documented bounded evidence.

Safe fixes

• Add cost attribution tags and bounded retention
• Remove a proven unused non-production resource through an approved workflow

Approval-required changes

• Deleting resources, changing service tier, retention, reliability, or customer-visible limits

Verification

• Compare normalized billing before and after over a representative period
• Confirm reliability and performance budgets remain satisfied

Completion contract

Apply the shared module contract and the module-specific limitations below.

Known limitations

• Pricing is time-sensitive and must be verified at audit time