Stop watching your money burn. Why Agencies need a Financial Firewall, not just a log viewer.
It starts with a Slack message at 9:00 AM on a Tuesday.
“Hey, did we mean to run that evaluation script all weekend?”
You check your OpenAI dashboard. Your heart sinks. A simple loop in a dev environment—meant to run for 10 minutes—ran for 48 hours. It burned through $4,200 in GPT-4 tokens. That’s your entire margin for the month, gone in a weekend.
If this sounds familiar, you aren’t alone. In 2024, “Shadow AI Spend” became the silent killer of SaaS profit margins.
Your Apps
Proxy
Providers
Figure 1: AI Cost Ops Architecture - Intercepting and optimizing traffic flow.
The Lie of “Observability”
The market is flooded with AI “Observability” tools (Helicone, LangSmith). They promise to help you manage costs. But look closely at what they actually do:
They log your requests.
They draw beautiful charts showing your money burning.
They send you an email after you’ve exceeded your budget.
Observability is a smoke detector. It beeps loudly while your kitchen burns down. What you need is a sprinkler system.
Enter AI Cost Ops: The Financial Firewall
We built AI Cost Ops because we were tired of being the “Janitors” of AI billing—cleaning up messes after they happened. We wanted to be the Bouncers.
Unlike passive dashboards, AI Cost Ops is a Middleware Proxy. It sits between your code and the LLM provider, acting as a hard financial firewall.
1. The Hard Budget Block (The “Kill Switch”)
Most platforms offer “soft limits” that alert you. We enforce Hard Limits per customer.
Scenario: You set a $50.00 limit for Client A.
Action: Their script goes rogue and tries to spend $50.01.
Result: We intercept the request and return a
403 Forbiddenerror. The API call never reaches OpenAI. Zero extra cost.
2. The “Hidden” Cost of Local AI
Smart teams are moving to Local LLMs (Llama 3 via Ollama) to save on tokens. But “Free” open-source models aren’t free—you pay for GPU electricity and hardware wear.
AI Cost Ops is the first platform to offer Unified Offline Tracking. You define your hardware cost (e.g., “$0.50/hour”), and we track your local model usage alongside your cloud spend, giving you a true Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
3. Agency-Grade Reporting (Gamma Integration)
Agencies waste hours taking screenshots of dashboards to justify invoices.
We integrated with Gamma to automate this.
Click “Copy for Gamma” in our dashboard.
Paste into Gamma.
Get a professional slide deck showing Total Spend, Net Savings (from our caching engine), and Efficiency Scores in 30 seconds.
Stop Watching Your Money Burn. Start Saving It.
You don’t need another dashboard to watch your burn rate. You need a tool to control it.
AI Cost Ops is live today.
✅ Block over-budget requests instantly.
✅ Cache repeat queries to save 30-50% on tokens.
✅ Track Local & Cloud models in one view.