If your AI bill doubled tomorrow, could you explain why?

Not just notice it. Explain it.

Could you identify which team, feature, agent, or customer caused the increase?

When everyone shares one provider key, the first integration is easy. A few months later, the bill becomes one large number and attribution turns into detective work.

Provider dashboards show models and tokens. Logs show requests. Finance still asks who owns the cost.

Cost attribution is one of those jobs everyone plans to fix later. “Later” usually begins when someone asks for a breakdown by Friday.

How are you handling it today?

• Separate keys for every team or project
• Metadata attached to each request
• A central LLM gateway
• Spreadsheets and manual reconciliation
• Not tracking it yet

Even “we aren’t tracking it” is a useful answer. I’m especially curious about what stopped working when you moved from 1 AI feature to several.