Rails Cost Intelligence

See which parts of your Rails app really drive cost

ActiveUsage plugs into ActiveSupport::Notifications and turns runtime signals into practical cost estimates for endpoints, jobs, and tasks — so your team can spot expensive paths, prioritize optimizations, and explain where infra spend comes from.

Install the Gem See how it works

Local-first by design — with a natural path to hosted analytics

activeusage.com/dashboard

$4.82

Today's cost

↑ 23%

vs last week

Endpoints

Cost by Endpoint — Today

Sort: highest ↓

OrdersController#create

234 ms avg · 3.2k req

$1.18

UsersController#index

98 ms avg · 8.1k req

$0.75

ReportsController#show

145 ms avg · 1.4k req

$0.42

ProductsController#show

22 ms avg · 12k req

$0.09

SessionsController#new

8 ms avg · 900 req

$0.03

⚠

OrdersController#create cost spiked 2.4× today vs baseline

Your app emits performance data, but not cost decisions

Teams can see latency, errors, and cloud invoices, but still struggle to answer which endpoint, job, feature, or customer is actually driving spend.

🔍

Billing is too far from the code

Your AWS bill shows totals. Your app shows requests and jobs. What is missing is the bridge between them, so the expensive code paths stay hidden.

⏱

APM answers a different question

Performance tools tell you what is slow. They do not tell you what is expensive at your real traffic volume or which workloads deserve budget attention first.

💸

Teams need useful estimates, not fake precision

In shared environments you cannot measure the physical cost of a single request perfectly. You can, however, allocate infra cost well enough to make better engineering decisions.

Built for cost observability, not generic monitoring

ActiveUsage helps Rails teams connect runtime behavior to infrastructure spend without bolting on a heavyweight platform.

⚡

Local-first setup

Start with a gem and Rails Engine that run inside your app. ActiveUsage plugs directly into ActiveSupport::Notifications so you can get value fast without sending data anywhere on day one.

📊

Cost allocation by workload

See estimated cost per controller#action, background job, or task using a cost allocation model built from runtime signals.

🔔

Cost Spike Alerts

When you move to hosted, get alerted when an endpoint or job jumps above its baseline before a deploy quietly increases your spend.

📈

Historical Trends

Follow how estimated cost changes across deploys, traffic spikes, and product work so you can see what actually moved the bill.

🏷

Custom Tagging

Attribute cost by team, feature, tenant, or customer to make ownership clearer and support smarter chargeback conversations.

🔗

CI/CD Budget Gates

Add guardrails in CI when you are ready, so cost regressions get caught before they become production surprises.

Start locally, grow into hosted

The first step is intentionally small: install the gem, mount the engine, and start seeing cost estimates inside your app.

Install the gem

Gemfile

# Gemfile
gem 'activeusage'

$ bundle install

Mount the engine

config/routes.rb

# config/routes.rb

mount ActiveUsage::Engine,
  at: '/activeusage'

Configure the gem

config/initializers/activeusage.rb

# config/initializers/activeusage.rb

ActiveUsage.configure do |config|
  config.app_name = "my-rails-app"
  config.default_tags = {
    environment: Rails.env
  }
end

The first version lives inside your app. Later, you can add hosted history, alerts, exports, and team workflows without changing the core instrumentation model.

Simple, transparent pricing

Free for local visibility. Upgrade when you want history, alerts, and collaboration.

Free

Local-first visibility for a single app. No account needed.

$0 / month

✓ 1 project
✓ Local dashboard
✓ Endpoint, job & task cost estimates
✓ Last 24h retention
✗ Hosted history
✗ Team & API access

Install Free

Pro

Hosted analytics for small teams that want history and multi-project views.

$29 / month

✓ Up to 3 projects
✓ 30 days hosted history
✓ Cost trends and comparisons
✓ Team members & invitations
✗ API access
✗ Unlimited projects

Join Hosted Waitlist

Scale

For teams with many apps, longer history needs, and programmatic access.

$79 / month

✓ Unlimited projects
✓ 90 days hosted history
✓ Cost trends and comparisons
✓ Team members & invitations
✓ API access
✓ Priority support

Join Hosted Waitlist

Enterprise

For organizations with advanced security, compliance, and scale requirements.

Custom

✓ Unlimited projects
✓ Custom retention
✓ SSO / SAML
✓ Compliance & export controls
✓ Custom SLAs
✓ Dedicated support

A clearer way to talk about Rails cost

❝

"For the first time we could point to a few expensive endpoints and say: this is where the bill comes from, this is what we fix next."

Michał K.

Lead Engineer, fintech startup

❝

"What clicked for us was the model: not fake precision, but a useful allocation of cost that made prioritization much easier."

Sarah T.

Staff Engineer

❝

"The local dashboard made adoption easy. We did not need to buy into a full platform just to see whether the idea was useful."

Piotr W.

CTO

Start with local cost visibility, expand when you need more

Install the gem, find the most expensive paths in your app, and add hosted workflows later if your team needs alerts, history, or exports.

Install the Gem See Hosted Plans