News & guides
Designing an AI Spend Dashboard People Actually Read
Most LLM cost dashboards show token counts nobody acts on. The four or five panels worth keeping, why unit cost beats totals, and how to avoid vanity metrics.
· 11 min read
Does Streaming Cost More? What You Actually Pay For
Streaming changes when tokens arrive, not how many are billed. Where it does affect spend, and the abandonment case that genuinely wastes money.
· 8 min readEscalation Rate: The Metric That Decides Your Default Model
The share of tasks your cheap model cannot finish decides whether a two-tier setup saves money or quietly doubles it. How to measure and act on it.
· 9 min readFinOps for AI Teams: What Transfers From Cloud and What Does Not
Cloud FinOps practice mostly transfers to LLM spend, but rightsizing and reserved capacity do not. What to keep, what to drop, and what to instrument first.
· 9 min read
Forecasting Next Quarter's AI Spend as a Range
Why extrapolating token usage gives the wrong number, which drivers actually move an AI bill, and how to build a defensible range instead of a point estimate.
· 12 min read
Free Tier Strategies: Getting Real Answers Without Paying
Free tiers are evaluation budgets, not production capacity. What they are for, where the limits bite, and how to fit a real model evaluation inside one.
· 12 min read
GPU Rental Cost Math: Utilisation Decides Everything
A rented accelerator bills by the hour whether or not you use it. How to work out effective cost per token from your own traffic shape.
· 8 min readNegotiating AI Contracts: What Is Actually on the Table
Rate cards are the least negotiable part of an AI vendor contract. What you can actually move on retention, rate limits, SLAs and exit terms, and what leverage you need.
· 9 min read
Per-Seat vs Per-Token Pricing: Which One Fits Your Team
Per-seat billing meters people, per-token billing meters work. Here is what each optimises for, which workloads each punishes, and how to model both.
· 11 min readPrepaid vs Postpaid AI Billing: Credits or an Invoice
Prepaid credits cap your downside and expire. Postpaid invoices never block work and arrive after the damage. How to pick when usage is unpredictable.
· 11 min readPrompt Caching Savings: The Arithmetic Nobody Runs
Cached input is priced far below uncached input. Working out what that is worth for your workload, and what prompt structure it demands.
· 8 min readQuantization Cost Savings and the Quality You Trade Away
Lower precision cuts memory and raises throughput, which is what makes single-GPU hosting possible. What it costs in quality is not evenly distributed.
· 8 min readReady to try it?
Every model behind one key. Start free and upgrade when it sticks.