Vantage Launches a Forecasted Costs API Endpoint

Today, Vantage is announcing the launch of the Forecasted Costs API endpoint to retrieve forecasted costs from Cost Reports. Customers who use the Vantage API can now programmatically review forecasted cloud spend based on their current usage trends.

Previously, Vantage customers could view forecasted costs within the Cost Reports UI; however, it was not possible to programmatically retrieve these costs for automation or external analysis. Vantage also offered a /costs API to retrieve details about past and current costs, but this endpoint did not include projected future costs. Developers who wanted to use this information to build internal cost monitoring scripts had to manually check the Vantage UI for forecasted spend instead of integrating it directly into their workflows for automated budget tracking and alerting.

Now, with the new Forecasted Costs endpoint, customers can fetch forecasted costs directly from their Cost Reports by sending a GET request to /cost_reports/{cost_report_token}/forecasted_costs. Customers can also specify start and end date, as well as provider and service filters. This allows for greater flexibility in budgeting, cost monitoring, and overall planning by integrating cost forecasts into existing workflows.

To get started with this new API endpoint, review the API docs. For information on forecasting in Vantage, see the product documentation.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is being announced today?

Vantage is launching the new Forecasted Costs API endpoint to programmatically retrieve forecasted costs from Cost Reports.

2. Who is the customer?

Developers and FinOps teams who use the Vantage API to automate cost monitoring and forecasting.

3. How much does this cost?

The API is free to all users, including those in the free tier.

4. How do you make a request with this endpoint?

Send a GET request to /cost_reports/{cost_report_token}/forecasted_costs.

curl --request GET \
     --url 'https://api.vantage.sh/v2/cost_reports/rprt_1234/forecasted_costs?start_date=2025-03-01&end_date=2025-03-30&provider=aws&service=AmazonEC2&limit=500' \
     --header 'accept: application/json' \
     --header 'authorization: Bearer TOKEN'

• Each request requires the associated Cost Report’s cost_report_token. You can retrieve this token from the /cost_reports endpoint or at the end of the Cost Report’s URL when viewing the report in the console (e.g., rprt_1234 in https://console.vantage.sh/reports/rprt_1234).
• You can filter the results with a start_date and end_date for the forecast, as well as by provider (e.g., aws) and service (e.g., AmazonCloudFront).
• You can set a limit or the number of results to return. The maximum is 1000.

The following JSON is returned in a successful 200 response.

  "forecasted_costs": [
    {
      "date": "2025-03-01T00:00:00Z",
      "amount": "181.72897449219762",
      "provider": "aws",
      "service": "AmazonCloudFront"
    },
    {
      "date": "2025-03-01T00:00:00Z",
      "amount": "245.16990449178309",
      "provider": "aws",
      "service": "AmazonCloudWatch"
    },
    ...

Forecasts are returned per date and service, along with the amount.

5. How do I authenticate with Vantage to use the API?

The Vantage API uses a Vantage API token for authentication. All API calls performed by the API are authenticated via your user token.

6. How does Vantage generate forecasts?

Vantage uses a time-series model to generate forecasts and runs through all available data ingested into the platform on a per-service basis (e.g., EC2, RDS). These costs are forecasted into the future, taking into account seasonality or one-off spikes.

7. Where can I read the documentation?

Vantage provides multiple resources for getting started with the API:

• The Vantage API documentation site contains information about available API endpoints and provides a tool for running API calls directly on the site.
• The “FinOps as Code” repository contains tutorials and code samples for getting started with the Vantage API.