Representative embodiments disclose mechanisms to calculate resource costs (e.g., processing, memory, storage and/or monetary costs) to provide an online service. The service is offered by a service provider that provides a plurality of different online services. To identify systems involved in providing a particular service, each request is associated with a unique identifier. The identifier is passed between systems and logged. Thus a trace of the unique identifier yields all systems involved in providing the service. A maximum operational load, calculated from operational data, is used to calculate a cost per request. A statistical sampling of the logged data is retrieved and the cost for each request in the sample is calculated based on a sum of the costs of the systems used to service the request. The cost of each system is the cost per request times the number of times the system is used to fill the request.