Cost Driver

Category: finance

A factor that causes a change in the cost of an activity.

A cost driver is the "throttle." In cloud computing, the cost driver is the number of API requests or the gigabytes of storage. Identifying the driver is essential for cost accounting, as it allows you to link your expenses directly to your output volume.

Common Examples

• The primary cost driver for our DataGiss platform is the volume of satellite imagery we ingest daily into our ClickHouse clusters.
• We analyzed our cloud billing to isolate the primary cost driver of our recent AWS overage, which turned out to be our backup replication.