FinOps for AI agents
Nobody can tell you what your AI actually costs.
Not per agent, not per team, not per outcome. Companies are scaling agents against one line on a provider invoice, and finance is already asking what it bought. That is the next thing governance has to solve.
The problem
Three questions your CFO will ask this year.
All of them are fair. None of them can be answered today.
What did AI cost us last quarter?
One line on an invoice. No breakdown, no owner, and no way to connect it to anything the business got.
Which team spent it?
Shared keys and shared assistants produce one shared bill. The money is real, but nobody owns it.
Was any of it worth it?
You can count what the agents did. You cannot see what it was worth. A task that failed four times costs the same as one that worked.
Why it is still unsolved
This is harder than a dashboard.
Plenty of tools show you a total. Almost none can tell you whose it was, because by the time the cost appears, the context that explains it is gone.
Tokens are not cost
Caching, context reuse and model tiers mean two runs that look identical can bill very differently. Counting tokens gives you an estimate, not an answer.
The bill has no names on it
Providers invoice a company, not an agent. By the time the cost reaches finance, there is nothing left to show who caused it.
Attribution needs identity
To charge a cost back, you have to know which person, which agent and which permission produced it. You need that at the moment it happens, not months later.
That is where we already sit
Every governed call passes through Palma with its identity, its permissions and its policy decision attached. Cost is the one field that record is missing.
Tokens are not cost
Caching, context reuse and model tiers mean two runs that look identical can bill very differently. Counting tokens gives you an estimate, not an answer.
The bill has no names on it
Providers invoice a company, not an agent. By the time the cost reaches finance, there is nothing left to show who caused it.
Attribution needs identity
To charge a cost back, you have to know which person, which agent and which permission produced it. You need that at the moment it happens, not months later.
That is where we already sit
Every governed call passes through Palma with its identity, its permissions and its policy decision attached. Cost is the one field that record is missing.
Where it starts
Some of the picture already exists.
Usage is measured per tool and per client today — calls, success rate, latency and token count, with failures broken out by cause. It is not cost attribution yet, but it is the raw material that makes attribution possible.
- Token count and call volume per tool
- Failures split by cause — connection, credential, rate limit
- Usage per client and per session over time
What we're building
Cost, governed like everything else.
Access, policy and audit already follow the person through one connector. Spend is the next thing to add.
- 01
See what an agent actually costs
Cost per run, per agent and per tool call, instead of a monthly total you split by guesswork.
- 02
Charge it back to the team that caused it
Spend follows the same identity and groups that already control access, so finance gets a breakdown by team and business unit without anyone building a spreadsheet.
- 03
Let teams set their own budgets
Today one admin types the same number into every field, because doing it properly takes days. The teams that own the work should own the limit, and it should enforce itself.
- 04
Stop paying for work that produced nothing
Failed actions, repeated retries and duplicate calls cost the same as the ones that worked. Once you can see them, you can stop them.
- 05
Know what scaling will cost before you scale
Forecast from real usage, so taking agents from one team to the whole company is a plan rather than a guess.
For what you can control today, see reducing the cost of AI agents.
Book a demo
See what governed AI agents look like.
A 20-minute demo on your stack. We'll show Palma working with the agents, tools and identity provider you already run.
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