The FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) is a community-driven, open specification that defines a common schema for technology cost and usage data across cloud, SaaS, data center, and other technology categories.
FOCUS establishes a consistent, vendor-neutral vocabulary for billing and usage data. It defines a collection of standardized datasets, specifying the columns (dimensions and metrics), their associated requirements, and specification-wide attributes needed to enable interoperable, comparable, and analysis-ready data across providers and technology categories.
The project is actively maintained and adopted by a growing ecosystem of cloud providers, SaaS vendors, enterprises, and FinOps tooling platforms. This repository contains the specification releases, source, build and validation tooling, and supporting contributor guidance that help practitioners, platforms, and providers produce and consume data that is consistent, portable, and aligned to FinOps practices.
- The official project name is FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification
- The official acronym is FOCUS
- The term FOCUS Specification is the accepted shorthand for the project's output
For a deeper overview of FOCUS, its capabilities, and adoption, see the FOCUS website.
Use the following links to access the latest specification artifacts:
- Latest Public Release: Stable release for general implementation and reference.
- Latest Working Draft: In-progress draft reflecting current working group development.
Start here:
For topic-specific standards, see:
- Editorial Guidelines
- Normative Requirements Guidelines
- Specification Change Guidelines
- See the Guidelines Directory for additional project guidance
The keywords MUST, MUST NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT, and MAY in the specification are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 (RFC2119 and RFC8174), when and only when they appear in all capitals.
FOCUS restricts normative language to this subset as defined in the project's Normative Requirements Guidelines.
Implementations are expected to satisfy the MUST and MUST NOT requirements defined in the specification. Individual unmet requirements are recorded as deviations and evaluated against per-dataset allowances by the FinOps Certified FOCUS Conformant program for data generators.
For details on certification, see FinOps Certifications for Organizations.
Changes to the specification are documented in CHANGELOG.md.
FOCUS uses a versioning approach inspired by Semantic Versioning 2.0, but versions should not be interpreted as strict compatibility guarantees. New versions favor additive capabilities, clarifications, and expanded coverage. Breaking changes follow a formal deprecation cycle documented in the CHANGELOG and Specification Change Guidelines.
Implementations should explicitly declare the version of FOCUS they align to.
For release process details and version planning context, see RELEASE-PLANNING.md.
FOCUS is developed under an open governance model with participation from providers, vendors, and practitioners across the ecosystem.
For additional details, see the project repository: