Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Shipped: Self-serve your MCP server credentials

Enterprise agent platforms need a client ID and client secret in hand before they will connect to anything. An admin with the Modify MCP Settings permission can now issue that pair directly in Settings, connect the platform, and manage the credential lifecycle on whatever schedule your security policy requires. No support request, no wait.

Our Customer Success AI bill tripled. Here's why we're spending more.

Pop quiz: If you spend $40,000 per month on Anthropic, and you’ve got two customers, what’s your cost per customer? If you bypassed the easy answer of $20,000 and said, “Scott, you old trickster, that’s not enough information to answer that question,” you’ve won today’s prize: a lesson in the perils of average costs. Let’s flesh out the situation: You put an AI feature in your product, a document assistant powered by Claude.

Shipped: Rightsize Kubernetes workloads without leaving your MCP client

Changing a Kubernetes resource request takes two numbers: what the workload requests, and what it uses. The CloudZero MCP server now returns both, by cluster, namespace, or workload. This gives you a number you can defend. Usage comes back as P95 over the date range you query, 30 days by default. When an engineering lead asks whether a service runs on a smaller request, that is the figure that settles it. Over-provisioning and under-provisioning show up on the same query.

LLM token cost: pricing per token explained

LLM token cost is the price a provider charges per token a model reads or writes, quoted in dollars per million tokens. Input and output bill at separate rates, with output priced at roughly 5x input. As of September 2026, published rates range from under $0.10 to more than $180 per million tokens on top-end reasoning tiers. In late 2025, Hardik Sonetta of Thomson Reuters Labs published a warning about the most common prompt caching mistake in production.

AI usage tracking: Monitor spend by team, feature & model

AI usage tracking means measuring who and what consumes AI across your company, by team, feature, and model, then converting the usage into spend and cost per unit of work. Provider consoles stop at totals per API key. Tracking puts names on those totals: which team, which product, which model, and whether any of it was worth the money. In May 2026, CNBC reported that “almost every Fortune 500 is tracking overall AI usage,” quoting ModelOp CTO Jim Olsen. The same reporting carried his warning.

Repo rightsizing: audit every model call in a repo you already shipped

Repo rightsizing is a single-pass audit of every real model call in a codebase you already shipped: SDK invocations, sub-agent dispatch sites, and agent frontmatter pins. Each call site is scored on the job it actually does, and the result commits as one blueprint file you can diff next quarter. It replaces one-skill-at-a-time reviews, which miss files where a single model key covers two different jobs.

Shipped: Find the S3 buckets paying early delete fees

S3 lifecycle rules move data to Standard-IA or Glacier to cut storage cost. CloudZero now flags the buckets where that move backfires: an early delete fee is charged when an object leaves its tier before the tier’s minimum storage duration. The cause isn’t always a misconfigured lifecycle rule. A manual delete, an overwrite, or an object written straight into the tier by a replication or backup job produce the identical charge.

Shipped: Smarter period comparisons in Explorer

Compare Periods launched with two display modes: Aligned and Overlay. The top request from customers was bringing back a true side-by-side view, the kind where two independent charts sit next to each other so you can compare the overall shape of each period. Split brings that back. But the team also added Delta, a new mode that shows the dollar difference between periods.

AI gross margin: how AI spend hits SaaS profitability

AI gross margin is what remains of SaaS profitability after inference, model routing, and AI infrastructure land in cost of revenue. The numbers have moved. AI products averaged 45% gross margin in 2025 and are projected near 53% in 2026, against the 70% to 85% that SaaS built its valuations on. The compression is real, measurable, and manageable for companies that can see their cost to serve.

Codex vs. Claude Code in 2026: cost, capability, and which one your team should pick

Codex is OpenAI's terminal-based autonomous coding agent, bundled into ChatGPT plans and billed through token-based credits. Claude Code is Anthropic's terminal-based coding agent, sold through Claude subscriptions or the API. Codex is cheaper to enter; Claude Code is stronger on complex work. Both run $100 to $250 per developer monthly at active use.