Client hosting cost and margin portal for DigitalOcean

I run an agency that hosts client sites and apps on DigitalOcean, and every month I rebuild the same spreadsheet to work out what each client actually costs me before I bill them. Build me a client hosting cost portal that does it for me, backed by DigitalOcean for the cost and resource data and Xero for raising the invoice.

Main view: a client list. Each client is one row, and each client maps to a DigitalOcean tag or project that I configure once inside the app. Each row shows this month's raw infrastructure cost, the amount I bill the client, the margin in both currency and percentage, and a status badge. Highlight any client running at a negative margin, and default the sort to worst margin first. Put a totals row at the top or bottom with total raw cost, total billed, and blended margin across the whole book.

Costs must come from real billing data, not price list estimates. Use List All Invoices to find the current and prior billing periods, Retrieve an Invoice Summary for the period totals and product charge groupings, Retrieve an Existing Invoice for the individual line items, and Get Customer Balance for month to date usage and the account balance. List Billing History can back the period picker. Attribute each invoice line item to a client where the line names a resource owned by that client's tag, and route anything that cannot be matched to an unattributed bucket rather than spreading it silently.

Clicking a client opens a breakdown of every resource attributed to them, grouped by type with a subtotal per group and a line item cost per resource. Droplets come from List All Droplets filtered by the client's tag. Load balancers come from List All Load Balancers and reserved IPs from List All Reserved IPs, both matched to the client by tag or by the Droplets they front. Volumes, volume snapshots and Droplet snapshots come from List Associated Resources for a Droplet, with List All Block Storage Volumes and List All Snapshots as the account wide cross-check. Show each resource's name, size or plan, region, status, and monthly cost.

The app stores the per-client configuration itself, since none of it lives in DigitalOcean or Xero. Each client record holds the display name, the DigitalOcean tag or project it maps to, the billing model (either a markup percentage applied to raw cost or a flat monthly retainer), the retainer or markup value, and the matching Xero contact name. Give me a settings screen to add, edit and remove these mappings, and when mapping, offer the real tag list from List All Tags and the project list from List All Projects (with List Project Resources to resolve project membership) so I am picking from what exists rather than typing strings.

Each client row gets a Generate invoice button. It calls Xero Create Invoices to create a sales invoice with status DRAFT, with one line item per resource group (Droplets, load balancers, reserved IPs, volumes, snapshots) priced at the configured markup, or a single retainer line if that is the billing model. Identify the customer using the Xero contact name stored in the client's configuration, because there is no contact lookup available. Never send the invoice: it stays a draft for me to review. After a successful create, show the returned invoice number and status on the client row and record that this client has been invoiced for this period, so I cannot double bill by clicking twice.

Build in the DigitalOcean billing traps agencies get burned by. A powered off Droplet still bills in full because the resources stay reserved, so show powered off Droplets with a clear still billing badge and their full cost, never as free. Snapshots keep billing at roughly 0.06 dollars per GiB per month even after the source Droplet is destroyed, so cross-reference every snapshot against the current Droplet list and surface orphaned snapshots as unattributed cost with an estimated monthly charge, rather than absorbing them into overhead. Do the same for reserved IPs that are not assigned to any Droplet. Droplet billing is per second, so mid-month client changes prorate: label the current period figure as month to date and make clear it is partial until the invoice closes.

Finish with an unattributed cost panel that lists everything not covered by a client mapping: untagged Droplets, orphaned snapshots, unassigned reserved IPs, and account level charges, each with its cost and a running total. This is the number that tells me how much of the bill I am eating, so it should be visible from the main client list, not buried.