Insights · AI operations · · 1 min read

Cost discipline for AI products

AI features can quietly become the largest line on a product’s bill. In a group of companies, one product’s spend can hide inside another’s. We make AI cost a first-class metric for every company.

Every product sees its own economics

For each company we aim to track hosting, database, AI, email and third-party costs next to revenue and gross margin. A single group invoice must never hide whether an individual product is healthy.

Practical controls

  • Separate AI projects and budgets per product, with soft and hard monthly limits.
  • Model routing. Simple classification and summarisation run on smaller, cheaper models; strong models are reserved for high-value reasoning.
  • Caching for deterministic, low-variance responses where it is safe.
  • Batching for work that does not need to be real-time.
  • Output limits so responses are as long as they need to be — and no longer.

Tools, reviewed quarterly

Shared infrastructure only saves money if it stays lean. We review tools and subscriptions every quarter and close duplicates.