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Billing

The Billing feature in the MemVerge AI platform provides cost visibility and chargeback capabilities across multiple departments. Each department can reserve resources (e.g., GPUs, CPU cores, memory) for its own workloads, while also making those resources available to other departments if configured.

In the billing dashboard, you can understand how resources are consumed across different departments, which workloads incur costs, and how cross-department usage influences overall expenses. This transparent chargeback model ensures that departments are accountable for the resources they consume—even if those resources originate from another department’s reservation.

By establishing a flexible chargeback model, the MemVerge AI platform functions like a spot market for compute resources. Departments that reserve resources can temporarily lease out their unused capacity, and other teams can “burst” into these resources when needed. This arrangement maximizes hardware utilization across the organization, reduces idle capacity, and encourages dynamic resource sharing—ultimately driving cost efficiency and collaboration.

This section explains how costs are tracked, how to interpret billing data, and what happens when another department uses your reserved resources or vice versa.

Accessing the Billing Dashboard

  1. Navigate to Billing
    • In the left-hand navigation, select Billing (or Reports > Billing, depending on your UI).
    • The Billing Report table appears, listing departments and their usage costs over a selected time range.

  2. Select a Time Range

    • Use the tabs to choose a predefined period (e.g., Last 7 days [Default], Last 30 days, Last 3 months, Last 6 months) or specify a custom date range.

    Billing Dashboard

Understanding the Columns

Each row corresponds to a Department, showing its resource usage and associated charges for the given period:

  • Reserved: The cost of resources the department explicitly reserved for its own workloads.
  • Bursted: The cost of additional resources temporarily borrowed (burst) beyond what was reserved.
  • Total: The sum of Reserved and Bursted costs for this department.
  • Income: Amount credited to this department when other departments use the resources it has reserved.
  • Actual Expense: The net cost after subtracting Income from the Total expense. If a department earns more from hosting other departments’ workloads than it spends on its own usage, this value could be negative (indicating positive net income).

Cross-Department Resource Usage

  1. Resource Ownership

    • Departments can “own” resources by reserving them (e.g., Node Groups, GPU capacity).
    • Other departments may utilize these “owned” resources if they have permission or if the platform is configured to allow bursting into shared pools.

  2. Billing Logic

    • Borrowing Department (User): Incurs a Bursted cost for using resources it did not reserve. This cost adds to their Total expense.
    • Owning Department: Receives Income from other departments that consumed its reserved resources. This income effectively offsets the owner’s own costs.

  3. Net Impact

    • The “borrowing” department sees an increase in its Actual Expense for using someone else’s resources.
    • The “owning” department sees a credit (under Income) and a reduction in its Actual Expense.

Example Scenario

  • Department A (Owner) reserves 10 GPUs.
  • Department B (Borrower) runs a project that needs 2 GPUs, which it “bursts” into Department A’s pool.
  • Department B is billed for those 2 GPUs (under Bursted) in its row, increasing its Total and final Actual Expense.
  • Department A sees an Income line item for the 2 GPUs used by Department B, decreasing Department A’s net costs.

Reporting and Analysis

  • Date Range Comparisons
    • Compare different billing periods (e.g., last 7 days vs. last 30 days) to spot trends in resource usage and cross-department borrowing.
  • Exporting Data
    • A future release will allow the billing report to be exported in CSV or Excel format for further analysis or chargeback processing in external systems.

Detailed Department Billing Breakdown

  1. Accessing the Detailed Billing Report

    • From the main Billing Report, select a department’s name (e.g., customer-support).
    • A detailed view appears, showing a Donut Chart of total expense, plus a bar or line chart indicating Reserved vs. Bursted expenses over time.

    Department Detailed Billing Report

  2. Project-Level Costs

    • Below the chart, you’ll see how much of the department’s expense is attributable to specific projects (e.g., chatbot, knowledge-base).
    • This breakdown helps identify which workloads or projects contribute most to the department’s overall costs.
  3. Income & Net Expense
    • Review any Income the department earned for hosting other departments’ workloads, then compare it to the department’s final Actual Expense.

Best Practices

  • Department-Level Budgeting: Encourage each department to monitor its Actual Expense column and adjust resource reservations to avoid unexpected costs.
  • Cross-Department Coordination: If departments frequently borrow from each other, plan reservations accordingly, or consider more balanced resource allocations.