FOCUS spec (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification)
The FOCUS spec (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) is an open, vendor-neutral data standard maintained by the FinOps Foundation that normalizes cost and usage data from different cloud and AI providers into one common schema, so spend can be compared and aggregated across vendors.
What problem FOCUS solves
Every cloud and AI vendor exports billing data in its own format, with its own column names and its own definitions of what a given cost figure includes — list price, negotiated price, or fully discounted effective price can all be labeled ambiguously. Before a common standard, comparing spend across vendors meant building a custom parser and a custom set of assumptions for every single vendor. FOCUS defines a shared schema — common column names such as BilledCost, EffectiveCost, and ListCost, and common definitions for what each one means — so data from different vendors can be loaded into one table and compared directly.
Why it matters for AI cost management
AI-SaaS companies routinely draw from more model and infrastructure vendors than a typical cloud-only company, which makes the normalization problem FOCUS solves proportionally larger. A FOCUS-aligned cost pipeline is what makes vendor cost reconciliation and cost attribution tractable across a large, heterogeneous vendor list instead of a bespoke integration per vendor.