ChangeCostEvidence before confidence
Methodology · Planned approach
A quote should help you decide what to do next. It should also tell you when the evidence is too weak to support that decision.
ChangeCost is unreleased. This page describes the intended pilot, not available estimation or settlement functionality.
Start with the whole change
The intended unit is a software change and all its attempts. Retries and abandoned work still consume resources. Evidence needs an explicit connection to the change; proximity in time is not enough to establish attribution.
Keep different economic measures separate
Tokens describe usage. Provider credits have their own units. Estimated costs depend on assumptions. Billed charges describe money reported by a provider. These measures must retain their currency, unit and billing basis rather than collapse into one misleading total.
A missing amount stays unknown. It is not an observed zero, and usage covered by a subscription is not automatically an additional cash charge.
Quote from comparable history
The planned estimator uses empirical p50 and p90 values from comparable past changes. These describe the selected history; p90 is not a guaranteed budget or a promise of future accuracy.
Quotes should expose the sample size, comparison group and evidence cutoff. When a narrow comparison lacks enough history, a broader comparison should be disclosed. If usable history remains insufficient, the result should be unpriced.
Reconcile before drawing conclusions
Importing the same record twice must not increase spend. Genuine retries must remain counted. Corrections need a revision history, and evidence that cannot be attributed should remain visibly unbound. A partial subtotal must not masquerade as the final cost of a whole change.
Evaluate without hindsight
The pilot will compare initial quotes with outcomes using only evidence available at quote time. A repository-wide baseline will help assess whether more specific change history adds useful information. Unpriced cases, incomplete evidence and abandoned expenditure belong in that evaluation.
Keep the developer in control
The initial direction is a local workflow with advisory checks and explicit evidence imports. Provider account setup and live collection are separate actions; the intended CLI does not silently reconfigure an IDE or account. Reliable prediction remains a research question. This site does not offer automated budget enforcement, a hosted dashboard or a cost guarantee.