Your company spent $2.3M on AI last year.
How much was waste?
In 2 minutes, you'll know which AI spend is waste and which is investment — with a CFO-ready answer ready before the board asks.
10-day free trial · No credit card required · Setup in 2 minutes
Recommendation: Switch search → gpt-4o-mini
Confidence 89% · Est. savings: $822/mo
The math is transparent
How much is recoverable in your AI bill?
Drag the slider to your monthly spend. We'll show you the five waste categories we check — and what fixing each one typically recovers.
Where waste comes from
Route to gpt-4o-mini / Haiku
Implement rolling context window
Exponential backoff + fail-fast on persistent errors
Prompt caching + semantic similarity cache
Prefetch all data before the first call
Estimated recoverable waste
per month
$19.2K
per year
32%
of your bill
10-day free trial · No credit card · 2 min setup
Estimates based on waste-category analysis of common AI API patterns. Actual recoverable waste varies by codebase and provider mix. Your Cognocient dashboard shows the exact figure.
0
Waste categories detected automatically
0 min
Time to first attribution dashboard
0
AI providers supported out of the box
0
Lines of code to change in your app
Before Cognocient
No visibility$0/mo
Total AI spend
- Waste undetected
- No per-feature breakdown
- CFO sees one monthly bill
With Cognocient
Waste recovered$0/mo
After waste recovery
- $0 waste caught automatically
- 7 features attributed in real time
- CFO has board-ready PDF in 1 click
The problem
The bill doubled. Nobody knows why.
Engineering has Datadog. Finance gets a spreadsheet.
You're spending. Not investing.
How it works
From black box to boardroom clarity
One proxy, zero code changes. Every API call observed, every dollar explained.
Point your API calls at Cognocient
Change one URL. All your AI traffic flows through our proxy — OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and 4 more providers.
Every call is tagged and attributed
Add X-Cost-Feature and X-Cost-Session headers. Spend is sliced by feature, team, session, and user automatically.
Waste detected. Savings surface automatically.
Anomalies, over-sized models, missed cache opportunities — flagged with one-click recommendations your team can apply instantly.
Everything your CFO and CTO
have been asking for
Observe spend across every team and model. Enforce budgets in real time. Route to the right model automatically. Generate board-ready reports in one click.
Every dollar, every team — in real time
Nine ways to cut AI waste
Beyond basic cost tracking — Cognocient classifies every dollar as investment or waste, eliminates redundant API calls, traces costs across multi-agent workflows, and links spend to business outcomes.
MCP / A2A Attribution
Track costs across multi-agent workflows end-to-end. Pass X-Cost-MCP-Server and X-Cost-Parent-Run-Id headers to get a full workflow cost tree — which agent called which tool and what it cost.
- Full workflow tree: parent run → child tool calls
- Per-server MCP cost breakdown dashboard
- Agent handoff attribution across sessions
Prompt Cache + Batch Routing
Cognocient automatically detects features with stable, repetitive prompts and surfaces cache opportunities — up to 75% savings on cached prefix reads. For non-real-time workloads, it identifies batch-eligible models and quantifies the 50% cost reduction available with zero integration changes.
- Detects low-variance prompt patterns automatically
- 75% off cached prefix reads on Anthropic + OpenAI
- 50% off async batch API — no code required
Semantic Similarity Caching
Stop paying for the same response twice. Cognocient uses pgvector to find semantically similar past responses — not just exact matches. When a new prompt is close enough (configurable similarity threshold), the cached response is returned in milliseconds at near-zero cost.
- pgvector HNSW index — sub-millisecond similarity search
- Configurable threshold via X-Cog-Similarity-Threshold header
- Fully fail-safe — cache miss always falls through to real API
Investment vs. Waste Classification
Not all AI spend is equal. Cognocient classifies every feature's spend as Investment (complex reasoning, justified model) or Waste (low-value calls on premium models). A live three-column dashboard shows what's working and what's recoverable — with one-click manual overrides.
- Keyword + token heuristic auto-classification
- Manual override: mark any feature Investment or Waste
- Live waste % + recovery amount per feature
- Dashboard ROI panel: investment, waste, efficiency score + one-sentence board summary
30/60/90-Day Spend Forecast
Know your AI bill before it arrives. Cognocient fits a linear trend to your last 60 days of daily spend per feature and projects forward — updated daily, no spreadsheets.
- Per-feature 30/60/90-day projections sorted by projected spend
- Trend direction badges — red for growing, green for falling
- Confidence bar shows how many days of history back each projection
FinOps Maturity Score
Your FinOps maturity score (0–100) calculated from actual product usage — not a survey. Maps to the FinOps Foundation's Crawl / Walk / Run model. Shows exactly what to do next to advance to the next phase.
- Crawl → Inform: proxy connected, spend visible
- Walk → Optimize: budgets enforced, waste reducing
- Run → Operate: board reports, routing rules, full governance
Cost per Outcome
Link AI spend to business results with a single header. Add X-Cost-Outcome: ticket-resolved and Cognocient shows your cost-per-ticket, cost-per-conversion, cost-per-document.
- One header — no SDK, no webhooks
- Spend by outcome category + feature × outcome matrix
- The ROI number your CFO needs to approve AI budgets
Token Maxing Detector
Automatically detect when GPT-4o or Claude Opus is generating under 500 tokens — a classification task any $0.0001/call model could handle. One click creates a routing rule that fixes it.
- Detects frontier models wasted on short completions
- Shows addressable spend and suggested cheaper model
- One-click routing rule creation — no code required
Agentic Cost Simulator
Model how agentic workflows will scale your AI bill before you deploy them. Set your agent call multiplier, expected traffic growth, and get a budget recommendation — based on your actual spend data.
- Agent multiplier slider — 1× to 10× baseline calls
- 90-day projection with growth compounding
- Budget recommendation with one-click enforcement setup
Spend Attribution
Know exactly where every dollar goes
AI spend broken down by team, feature, model, and user. Your CFO stops asking “why did costs jump?” because the answer is already on screen.
- Real-time attribution by feature, team, and user
- Session-level cost tracking across multi-step agents
- Model-by-model cost comparison
- GL-account tagging for accounting systems
4,200 calls/hr vs normal 180/hr. Likely eval harness left running.
Projected extra cost: $340 if unaddressed.
Anomaly Detection
Catch cost spikes before they hit the P&L
Proactive nightly alerts surface anomalies before your finance team notices them. Every morning: what changed, why, and what to do about it.
- Statistical anomaly detection on spend & frequency
- Root cause analysis with probable explanation
- Projected cost if left unaddressed
- One-click dismiss or escalate to Slack
ROI Measurement
Prove AI ROI to your board
Connect AI spend to business outcomes. Cost per ticket, contract, report. Turn spend into investment evidence your board will believe.
Board Reports
Board-ready PDFs, auto-generated
One click generates a CFO-grade PDF with AI-written narrative, spend breakdown, waste recovered, and efficiency score. No spreadsheet required.
- Monthly PDF with Claude-written narrative analysis
- AI Efficiency Score — board-level KPI
- FOCUS 1.1 export for FinOps platforms
- Automated delivery to finance team email
The waste taxonomy
Five places your AI budget disappears
These aren't edge cases. They exist in every AI-powered product. Most are invisible without a proxy layer. Cognocient detects all five, automatically.
Context Bloat
Multi-turn apps send the full conversation history on every call. After 5 turns, 40–60% of tokens are history you've already paid for.
Eval Contamination
Test harnesses and eval suites run against production endpoints. Developers forget to remove them. They run silently for weeks.
Model Overkill
Frontier models handle classification, routing, and summarization at 10× the cost of smaller models — with identical output quality on those tasks.
Cache Misses
Identical system prompts and repeated queries hit the API fresh on every call. Prompt caching exists. Almost nobody uses it systematically.
Invisible Spend
Without attribution headers, you see a single line on the bill. You cannot cut what you cannot see, measure, or trace to a team or feature.
Ranges are based on publicly documented LLM provider pricing and caching mechanics — not customer claims.
Waste identified in the first week
Eval contamination running against production endpoints — test harnesses left over from a sprint, silently draining budget for 6 weeks.
Representative finding · Cognocient waste-category detection
Of total AI spend classified as recoverable waste
Across model overkill, context bloat, cache misses, eval contamination, and invisible spend — the five waste categories Cognocient tracks automatically.
Based on waste-category analysis across Cognocient deployments
Works with every major AI provider
Who uses Cognocient
Built for every team that touches the AI bill.
From the engineer who sets the token limits to the CFO who signs off on the budget.
Customer support teams
Your AI resolves 850 tickets/month. Is it worth the cost?
Cognocient calculates cost per ticket resolved, flags when the model is oversized for the task, and surfaces the exact features driving your support bill.
Engineering teams
5 AI features in production. One bill. Which one is spiking?
Every API call tagged by feature, model, and team. The 40% cost increase traced to one feature in 2 minutes. One click applies the fix — no code changes required.
Agentic AI teams
One agent ran all weekend. How much did it cost?
Per-run budgets stop runaway agents before the Monday morning surprise. Every workflow tracked and limited — with graceful degradation, not hard stops that break your product. Write operations get a hard stop to protect external state. Read operations degrade gracefully so the agent still completes.
FinOps and finance teams
Chargeback by team. Board report in 15 seconds.
AI spend attributed by department, GL account, and business unit. One PDF with narrative, waste recovered, and efficiency score. No spreadsheet. No Sunday evening assembly.
CFOs and board prep
Board asks about AI ROI in 6 weeks. You need the answer now.
Waste vs investment, by feature and team, with business outcomes. The answer your board wants — available before they ask, not assembled the night before the meeting.
Vs. the alternatives
Built for finance teams. Not just engineering.
LLM observability tools are great for debugging prompts. They are not financial software.
Capability
LLM observability tools
Cognocient
Pricing
Simple pricing. Aligned with your AI maturity.
Start free. Upgrade when you see the value.
Observe
Base
Observe and monitor your AI spend.
Get started for freeWhat's included
- Real-time proxy with attribution
- Spend dashboard (feature, model, dept)
- Anomaly detection
- 3 budgets
- Basic PDF reports
Enforce + Optimise
Growth
For teams actively reducing AI waste and enforcing budgets.
Get started for freeEverything in Base, plus
- Unlimited budgets + enforcement policies
- One-click recommendation apply
- Smart routing rules
- Session & user-level attribution
- Cost per business outcome
- FOCUS standard export
- Investment vs. Waste classification
- Token Maxing Detector
- Context Tax Analyser
- 30/60/90-day spend forecast
- FinOps Maturity Score
- Semantic similarity caching
- Prompt cache + batch routing
- Proactive nightly insights
Decision Intelligence
Business
Full CFO-grade accountability and AI advisory.
Get started for freeEverything in Growth, plus
- AI Cost Advisor — natural language queries
- "Why did spend increase 40%?" answered
- Agentic Cost Simulator
- MCP / A2A workflow attribution
- AI Efficiency Score (board-level KPI)
All plans start with a 10-day free trial. No credit card required. Start free →
Get started today
Your next board meeting is in 6 weeks.
Will you have the AI spend answer?
Start your 10-day free trial and see your actual waste breakdown in under 2 minutes. No credit card. No sales call. Just your data.