Connect Google Cloud billing
Prepare the reporting access
Enable the Cloud Billing export and identify the query project, project containing the export table, dataset, standard or detailed export table, dataset location and one to ten service IDs. Grant BigQuery jobs.create in the query project and read access to the export dataset. Use a service account JSON credential or an unexpired read-only OAuth credential.
Create and confirm your Token Observe account, sign in and create a workspace. In Connect billing, choose the provider, give the connection a useful name and enter its reporting credential. Enter credentials only in the hosted portal’s masked field, never in a chat, worksheet or support message.
Collect and inspect the source
Choose Connect and collect costs. A saved credential can still have a failed or partial collection. Open Coverage details and check source status, reporting window, last successful collection and any reason for incomplete evidence. Use Collect latest 30 days after fixing permissions or configuration.
The connector queries a configured Cloud Billing BigQuery export for explicitly selected service IDs. It preserves each currency, includes credits in exported cost calculations and retains source dimensions. It is not a feed for every Gemini product or consumer subscription.
Keep the evidence usable
The credential field accepts service account JSON or an OAuth JSON object with type, access_token and expires_at. An OAuth expiry needs replacement through Rotate credential for the same account. Service accounts obtain short-lived tokens. Query scans can incur your own BigQuery charges: maximumBytesBilled defaults to 100,000,000 and is capped at 1,000,000,000 per query. These are query byte limits, not a fixed money cap.
The collectors bound a run to 31 completed UTC days, 20 requests or pages and 10,000 rows. A partial or failed collection keeps previous evidence with its status. Missing evidence remains unknown. One billing connection per provider per workspace prevents overlapping account connections.
To replace a credential, choose Rotate credential and confirm it accesses the same account. Changing accounts requires disconnecting first; disconnecting removes that connection’s retained costs. Scheduled collection stops when the trial expires. Retained authorized reads and exports remain subject to the shared traffic quota.
The texts this guide names
Where the guide above cites a law, a standard, a specification or a paper, this is the text itself, so an article number or a field name can be checked against the original rather than taken from this page. None of it is a source for what Token Observe does; that traces to the product’s own repository. Each read on .
- Google Cloud billing export setup docs.cloud.google.com
Where this argument meets an implementation
AI spend and subscriptions
What you were billed and what you were metered, recorded as two numbers and never added into one.
AI conversation evidence
What the AI was asked and what it returned, redacted before it is stored and bounded before it is kept.
Those pages are one product's implementation of what this guide argues for, each listing what it does not do beside what it does.
How it worksThe questions next to this one
Connect OpenAI billing
How do I connect OpenAI billing to Token Observe?
Connect Anthropic billing
How do I connect Anthropic billing to Token Observe?
Connect xAI billing
How do I connect xAI billing to Token Observe?
Terms this guide uses
Does billing setup give agents a model key?
No. Billing credentials read reports. Optional model calls need a separate inference key plus a workspace-issued agent identity, permissions and gateway credential.
Can I upload an invoice instead?
The workspace has an existing invoice-import path, but the new cloud portal does not provide its own CSV upload or automatic synchronization of those imports. Ask for setup help if your plan does not expose the supported reporting source.
After reading it, the next step is running it on your own hardware.
Create a cloud account and workspace. No card or server installation. Model calls and Google BigQuery scans can incur separate provider charges.