The present disclosure is related to methods, systems, and machine-readable media for allocating cost of disk usage to a linked clone virtual machine (VM). A determination can be made as to a number of disks used by a linked clone VM, among the disks in a software defined data center, over a time period. In some examples, a cost for a total usage of the number of disks over the time period can be allocated to the linked clone VM, regardless of whether the total usage over the time period includes usage by other VMs. In some examples, a cost for a total usage of the number of disks over the time period can be allocated to the linked clone VM, in proportion to the number of VMs that use the disk regardless of relative usage of the disk by each of the number of VMs.