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Beyond the bill

Perspectives on FinOps and AI economics: from the standards we help shape to the assumptions we challenge about cost, value, and what comes next.

Update

Expert support for the Microsoft FinOps toolkit

Allyte is open for business, coaching, advisory, and expert support for the Microsoft FinOps toolkit, from the people who help build and govern it.

Allyte · September 15, 2026

  • FinOps toolkit
  • FinOps hubs
  • Microsoft FinOps

Update

What's new in FinOps toolkit 14

A Copilot Studio agent template for querying hub data in plain language, an optimization recommendations pipeline built on Azure Advisor and custom queries, a simpler hub deployment experience, and a preview commitment discount eligibility dataset.

Michael Flanakin · May 13, 2026

  • FinOps toolkit
  • FinOps hubs
  • AI
  • Copilot Studio
  • optimization

Recent posts

Office hours

Office hours: a first look at FinOpsHubs.com

A multi-day ingestion mystery traced to a Kusto quirk under private networking, a technique for spotting new deployments from cost data alone, and a first look at FinOpsHubs.com.

Allyte · September 16, 2026

  • Office hours
  • FinOps toolkit
  • FinOpsHubs.com

Guide

Azure database savings plans: the 3-year term isn't about a bigger discount

Savings plan for databases now offers a 3-year term alongside the original 1-year option, but Microsoft's own documentation confirms both carry the same discount rate. Here's what actually changes, and how to decide which term fits.

Allyte · September 14, 2026

  • Reservations
  • Azure SQL
  • Cost optimization

Office hours

Office hours: is FinOps just observability

A discussion about whether FinOps is fundamentally an observability discipline, and a stark comparison of how much easier AWS makes billing telemetry look next to Azure's.

Allyte · September 2, 2026

  • Office hours
  • FinOps practice

Office hours

Office hours: why "dollars saved" is the wrong reservation metric

A debate over how to measure reservation and savings-plan performance landed somewhere more useful than the metric most teams default to, plus a look at how the FinOps toolkit handles price-sheet timing behind the scenes.

Allyte · August 5, 2026

  • Office hours
  • Reservations
  • FinOps toolkit

Update

FinOpsHubs.com is coming: join the waitlist

FinOpsHubs.com is a free experience layer coming to the FinOps hubs deployment you already run, and the waitlist is open for early access.

Allyte · July 28, 2026

  • FinOpsHubs.com
  • FinOps toolkit

Office hours

Office hours: an AI agent caught a missed discount

An AI agent queried a customer's own cost data and surfaced a billing discrepancy nobody had spotted, plus a FinOps toolkit v15 roadmap tease and a first mention of a new FinOps hubs customer portal.

Allyte · July 22, 2026

  • Office hours
  • AI costs
  • FinOps hubs

Office hours

Office hours: a Power BI bug that broke every refresh

A one-field data-type fix behind a mysterious Power BI refresh failure, and word that GitHub and Microsoft 365 Copilot usage data is coming to the FinOps toolkit.

Allyte · July 8, 2026

  • Office hours
  • FinOps toolkit
  • Copilot

Office hours

Office hours: who owns the AI budget

A reservation-savings row with no subscription name traced back to how Microsoft Customer Agreement billing actually works, plus a candid look at AI token costs becoming the FinOps team's next big fight.

Allyte · June 24, 2026

  • Office hours
  • Billing
  • AI costs

Office hours

Office hours: a Hybrid Benefit trick worth stealing

A live FinOps toolkit dashboard walkthrough turned into a coaching moment on effective savings rate, plus a field story about turning CapEx licensing into OpEx savings with Azure Hybrid Benefit and Arc.

Allyte · June 10, 2026

  • Office hours
  • FinOps toolkit
  • Cost optimization

Update

What's new in FinOps toolkit 13

Stability and usability work across FinOps hubs, Power BI, and Azure Optimization Engine, plus Key Vault purge protection support and Parquet exports in PowerShell.

Michael Flanakin · February 9, 2026

  • FinOps toolkit
  • FinOps hubs
  • Power BI

Guide

Gen5 to Gen6: what to check before you resize a single Azure VM

Azure's v6 VM sizes bring more cores and memory per dollar, but the move from v5 isn't a plain resize. Here's what to validate first, and why the real payoff comes after migration, not during it.

Roland Krummenacher · December 17, 2025

  • Compute
  • Usage optimization
  • Azure VM