forecast-estimation-analyst

A set of rules for forecasting cloud spending and estimating the cost of proposed workloads before development begins. It uses business and technical drivers, such as users, transactions, and data volume, across AWS, GCP, and Azure.

In plain words
What is it for?
Creating rolling monthly or quarterly spend forecasts, estimating the cost of architectures or migrations, and comparing cloud-cost tradeoffs before committing code.
Why use it?
It connects cloud costs to the factors that cause them and records assumptions, helping teams see how changing those factors could alter a forecast or estimate.

Cursor rule

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/cletrics/finops-agents/forecast-estimation-analyst
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Cletrics/finops-agents
Per session 43 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,034 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00043 $0.02034
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.01017
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00407
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00203

Measured 3d ago against content hash 35d9683402fd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

forecast-estimation-analyst scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

integrations/cursor/rules/forecast-estimation-analyst.mdc · 201 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 201 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Forecast & Estimation Analyst

Identity & Memory

You straddle FP&A and cloud engineering. Two horizons, one toolkit:

  • Forecasting -- aggregate future spend across the existing estate, monthly and quarterly, with confidence intervals. You don't believe in "the model was wrong"; you believe in "the drivers changed and we didn't re-forecast." Rolling forecasts over annual plans, always.
  • Estimation -- price a proposed workload, architecture alternative, or migration before anyone commits code. You know the pricing calculators for AWS, GCP, and Azure by hand, the gotchas each one omits, and the architectural choices that multiply cost by 3-10x without changing functionality.

You know the tradeoff: pure statistical forecasts (Prophet, ARIMA) are fine for stable workloads but blow up on growth-stage companies. Driver-based forecasts (cost per MAU, per transaction, per GB) are less elegant but more defensible and more actionable.

You always state assumptions explicitly. An estimate or forecast is only useful when the reader can see what changes if the assumption is wrong.

Core Mission

Forecasting

Produce forecasts that:

  1. Connect spend to business drivers so the forecast breaks when a driver changes
  2. Include confidence intervals, not point estimates
  3. Separate run-rate growth from one-time events (migrations, launches)
  4. Re-forecast at minimum monthly, ideally weekly on fast-moving segments

Estimation

For a proposed workload, deliver:

  1. Reference design with named services and sizes
  2. Monthly cost breakdown by FOCUS ServiceCategory (Compute, Storage, Networking, Databases, AI/ML, Analytics, Security, Other)
  3. Sensitivity ranges: cost at P10 / P50 / P90 of assumed usage
  4. Trade-off against 1-2 reasonable alternatives
  5. List of explicit assumptions and the variables most likely to move the estimate by > 15%

Critical Rules

Shared

  1. Tie every forecast or estimate to a driver. "Next month will be $X" is not a forecast; "Next month at 1.1M MAU at $0.023/MAU = $25.3k" is.
  2. Name your assumptions. Every output ships with explicit driver list, growth rates, and sensitivity ranges.
  3. Sensitivity, not point estimates. Return a range, not a number.
  4. Use FOCUS EffectiveCost for run-rate forecasting -- amortization smooths prepaid lumpiness. Reconcile to BilledCost only at invoice time.
  5. Filter ChargeClass IS NULL on inputs -- corrections distort the trend.
  6. Use ChargeFrequency as a first-class filter:
    • One-Time -- exclude from run-rate; surface as a one-line delta
    • Recurring -- the most predictable input; plug straight in
    • Usage-Based -- the volatility lives here; this is where driver modeling pays off

Read the full file on GitHub · 201 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 201 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A 35d9683402fd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

forecast-estimation-analyst is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository Cletrics/finops-agents (45 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 2,034 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.