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Frequently Asked Questions

Answers to the questions that come up most often when enterprises evaluate KOSTRA. If yours isn’t here, contact the KOSTRA team.

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Deployment

Is KOSTRA SaaS or self-hosted? Both. KOSTRA is offered as a fully managed SaaS, and can also be self-hosted in your own environment when data residency or policy requires it. The software is identical; only who operates it differs. How quickly can we get started? On the managed SaaS you connect your cloud accounts and begin — there is no infrastructure to stand up. Self-hosting takes longer because you deploy and operate the platform, but the KOSTRA team supports sizing, deployment, and upgrades. Can we self-host in a specific region? Yes. When self-hosted, KOSTRA runs in a Kubernetes cluster you control, including in the cloud region you choose, so it can sit alongside the workloads it analyzes. How do I connect a cloud account? You provide read-oriented credentials for the account and select the provider. KOSTRA validates the credentials and, for each provider, handles the provider-specific setup automatically where it can.

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Security

Where does my cost data live? On the managed SaaS, KOSTRA hosts and protects it with encryption and access control. If your policy requires that data never leave your infrastructure, self-host KOSTRA — then billing data, credentials, and analytics stay entirely in your environment. How are cloud credentials stored? Encrypted at rest. Secrets entered through the interface are write-only from the user’s side — they can be set and rotated but not read back. Is traffic encrypted? Yes. Web and API traffic is served over HTTPS, with certificates provisioned and auto-renewed. How is access controlled? Through role-based permissions aligned to a pool structure that mirrors your teams and budgets, so you can grant visibility broadly while restricting configuration.

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Pricing

How is KOSTRA priced? By edition — Essentials, Professional, and Enterprise — plus optional professional services, and available as a SaaS subscription or self-hosted. KOSTRA is not priced as a percentage of your cloud bill. See Pricing Overview and contact the team for a quote. Is there an evaluation option? Yes. Ask about an evaluation so you can validate coverage against your own accounts before committing.

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Integration

Which clouds does KOSTRA support? AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Huawei Cloud — broader coverage than most FinOps tools, so an estate that spans several providers is managed as one. See Supported Clouds & Services. Which services are covered per provider? Coverage includes billing, resource discovery, and recommendations across providers. For Huawei Cloud specifically — the provider most often missing from other tools — ECS, EVS, OBS, EIP, RDS, ELB, and IMS are discovered and optimized today; NAT is tracked through billing, with DCS and CCE discovery on the roadmap. The service matrix has the detail. Can KOSTRA notify my team? Yes. KOSTRA sends email notifications for alerts, reports, and account events, and can be branded to your organization.

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Roadmap

What is coming next? Broader per-service resource discovery — including additional Huawei Cloud services such as NAT Gateway, CCE, and DCS — and continued expansion of the recommendation catalog across providers. Will more AI models be supported? Yes. AI-assisted narration uses a language-model provider you configure and control (Anthropic, OpenAI, or DeepSeek today), and support for additional models is planned.