USGS Water Services · FinOps Profile

Usgs Water Finops

FOCUS-aligned FinOps profile for USGS Water Services (NWIS REST APIs). All USGS water data APIs are provided at no monetary cost to consumers — they are federally funded public-domain data services. There are no subscription fees, usage-based charges, data egress costs, or overage fees. The cost to the consuming organization is limited to internal engineering time, infrastructure for caching/downstream processing, and potential rate-limit-driven architectural overhead. FinOps practice here focuses on optimizing request efficiency, caching, and dependency risk management (especially given the 2027 WaterServices decommission).

Usgs Water Finops is the FinOps profile for USGS Water Services on the APIs.io network, aligned with the FinOps Foundation Framework.

It defines 3 billable meters, billed in USD, on a none cycle, and pricing category free.

The profile maps 7 FOCUS columns for cost-allocation reporting.

Tagged areas include Water, Hydrology, Environmental, Government, and Open Data.

Category: Government Open Data / Environmental APIs Pricing: Free Billing: None FOCUS v1.3
WaterHydrologyEnvironmentalGovernmentOpen DataFreePublic DomainFinOpsFOCUS

Framework Alignment

Framework
FinOps Foundation Framework
Data Spec
FOCUS v1.3

Charge Categories

No direct charges; federally funded

FOCUS Columns

BillingCurrency
USD
ChargeCategory
No Charge
InvoiceIssuerName
N/A (no-cost public service)
ProviderName
U.S. Geological Survey
PublisherName
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
ServiceCategory
Government Open Data
ServiceName
USGS Water Services

Meters

api_requests
Unit: request
Count of API requests made to USGS Water Services endpoints (no direct cost; tracked for rate-limit awareness and optimization)
data_volume
Unit: MB
Volume of data downloaded from USGS endpoints (no egress cost; tracked for cache efficiency and bandwidth planning)
engineering_hours
Unit: hour
Internal engineering hours spent on integration, maintenance, and migration (primary cost driver for USGS API consumption)

Sources