AI cost control for the era of tokens.
We find, cut and keep your LLM savings. Tidal Audit maps the spend for free. Tidal Gateway, a LiteLLM gateway we deploy and operate in your cloud, makes the changes stick. Tidal Telemetry shows live cost by team, feature and workflow, reconciled to your provider invoices. You pay a flat 20% of the savings we verify, and nothing else.
Live LLM cost, straight from your traces.
Tidal Telemetry is the live cost view in the Tidal suite, built on OpenLIT. Send OpenTelemetry data and explore traces with token usage, estimated cost, latency and errors. It is included in the engagement and open now as a live trial.
Cost & tokens
Inspect token usage and estimated per-call cost in LLM traces.
Latency & errors
Review request timing and errors alongside usage.
OpenTelemetry
Send traces, metrics and logs through OTLP.
Agent setup
Connect a coding agent to the hosted MCP server for setup and troubleshooting.
FinOps for AI, on four pillars.
The FinOps Foundation framework — visibility, attribution, optimization, accountability — applied to LLM spend. Same discipline. Different unit of cost.
Visibility
Token-level cost data ingested from every provider. Reconciled hourly. Filterable by provider, model, feature, team, customer, environment.
- OpenAI · Anthropic · Bedrock · Gemini · Azure · Groq · Together · Mistral
- Hourly ingestion · <5 min reconciliation lag
- Read-only by default · NDA + DPA on request
Attribution & chargeback
Every token mapped to a feature, team, and customer cohort. Monthly chargeback and showback, exported to your finance system or as CSV.
- Custom dimensions · feature, team, tier, region
- Cohort spend · customer-tier P&L
- NetSuite · QuickBooks · CSV · API
Anomaly detection
Real-time alerts when spend, latency, or quality deviates from a feature's rolling baseline. Slack, PagerDuty, email — and auto-throttle when it matters.
- Per-feature rolling baselines · seasonality-aware
- Slack · PagerDuty · email · webhook
- Optional auto-throttle & budget enforcement
Automated optimization
Routing, caching, and compression deployed behind feature flags, A/B tested seven days minimum, graduated only on quality & cost wins.
- Routing tree · per-request quality classification
- Semantic cache · sub-10ms hit latency
- Quality SLO + auto-rollback on regression
Six levers, one parts list.
Most teams combine three or four. The audit ranks which dominate your spend surface and projects savings before any commitment.
Model routing
Each request classified by complexity and routed to the cheapest model that meets your quality bar.
30–50%Semantic caching
Near-duplicate prompts fingerprinted with embeddings; identical answers served from sub-10ms cache.
20–40%Prompt compression
System prompts audited, examples deduplicated, retrieved context compressed. Every change A/B tested.
15–30%Batch & async pricing
Non-interactive workloads routed to batch endpoints (up to 50% discount) with SLO-aware queueing.
10–50%Provider arbitrage
Identical capability often costs 2–3× more at one provider. Route by capability-per-dollar.
20–35%Fallback chains
Smart retries and tiered fallbacks beat worst-case over-provisioning while holding SLO.
5–15%Assembly sequence: five weeks.
Every engagement follows the same four phases. Most customers see their first reconciled provider invoice by the end of week five.
Audit — map every dollar.
Ingest provider invoices, gateway logs, usage telemetry. Full spend map by provider, model, feature, team — ranked by dollar waste.
Agree — lock the baseline.
We set the baseline against your invoices, the quality guardrails and the contract. You sign off on every change.
Implement — deploy Tidal Gateway.
We deploy a LiteLLM gateway in your cloud and ship the changes through it: A/B tested 7 days vs. baseline, then graduated to 100% traffic.
Operate & reconcile.
We run the gateway, so savings don't drift back. Tidal Telemetry measures the result and every month closes with a signed Statement of Savings.
Pay on results.
One fee: a flat 20% of the savings we verify. Tidal Audit, Gateway and Telemetry operations are included. No licence.
Performance
Free audit. Then you only pay when we save you money — measured against a locked baseline, reconciled to provider invoices.
- Free audit · 1-week turnaround · countersigned baseline
- We implement, not just recommend · Tidal Gateway deployed and run by us
- Tidal Telemetry · live cost, chargeback and monthly signed statements
- Engineering pair · weekly reviews
- Quality SLO enforcement & auto-rollback
- No minimum spend · no down payment · 30 days' notice
Audit, Gateway, Telemetry
Three products, one fee. Our team runs all three. None is licensed or priced separately.
- Tidal Audit · free, read-only review of invoices and usage logs, run by our team
- Tidal Gateway · a LiteLLM gateway we deploy and operate in your cloud: routing, fallbacks, caching, batching, per-team budgets, hard stops
- Tidal Telemetry · live cost by provider, model, feature, team and workflow, and the evidence behind each monthly statement
- Baseline locked to invoices · provider price cuts excluded · quality regressions don't count
- No licence · no down payment · no minimum
Common questions.
Missing something? Email hello@finopsllm.com — we respond within one business day.
What is FinOps for LLM? [+]
What does FinOps LLM do? [+]
How is pricing structured? [+]
How much can we save? [+]
Which providers are supported? [+]
Does FinOps LLM support chargeback & showback? [+]
How do you handle customer data? [+]
How long does implementation take? [+]
Will optimization hurt output quality? [+]
Engineering guides that show up in AI answers.
Deep dives on LLM cost attribution, monitoring, caching, and governance. Cited by Microsoft Copilot when buyers research AI FinOps.
Chargeback vs showback
Which FinOps cost allocation model fits your team, and how to migrate from visibility to budget accountability.
IT chargeback and showback for AI
Apply chargeback and showback to LLM and GenAI spend: allocation rules, implementation steps, and common mistakes.
Showback comes before chargeback
Why leading FinOps teams start with showback, clean their data, and only then transfer budget ownership.
FinOps for LLM
The complete framework for visibility, attribution, optimization, and accountability across LLM and GenAI spend.
LLM cost monitoring
How production teams track token spend, set alerts, and build a real-time cost cockpit across providers.
LLM cost monitoring in production
Production monitoring stack, alert runbooks, and the metrics that catch spikes before they hit your invoice.
Agent spend guardrails
Budgets, rate limits, and circuit breakers for autonomous agents that can loop, retry, and surprise you.
Agent guardrails for production
Runtime controls, kill switches, and production metrics that keep agents from becoming runaway bills.
How much does GPT-5 cost?
Token pricing, expected tiers, and how to model spend for reasoning and frontier models.
Start with a clear picture of your AI spend.
About a week. Read-only access. We return with a full map of your spend, ranked by waste, plus a baseline Tidal Telemetry can track against. Free. No implementation commitment.