u/Anarkali2000 — reddlx

EMs, how do you actually track AI spend across your team?

Founder working on AI cost stuff here. Trying to learn how EMs actually deal with token spend instead of guessing.

The thing I keep running into: nobody really knows where the spend goes until finance forwards the bill. Is that just me, or is it like that on your team too? Do you know your cost per feature or per customer, or is it one number you can't break down?

And when it spikes, can you tell why? Retries, context bloat, some agent looping, an eval run someone forgot about. Or do you just find out after?

Curious how people handle this in a real org

reddit.com

u/Anarkali2000 — 7 days ago

▲ 1 r/AIDiscussion

I think "AI just got expensive" is usually bad measurement, not an unpredictable model

Every month our Claude Code spend moves around and nobody can say why. One month calm, the next up 40%, and the only explanation anyone has is we shipped some stuff in between. Ask in Slack which team drove it and the answer is always two or three things at once.

Here's the thing I keep landing on though. People treat token spend like it's inherently unpredictable, but I don't think it is. The same spend can turn into a merged PR or burn in a retry loop that ships nothing, and the invoice looks identical both ways. The provider dashboards give you token counts, not this team, this feature, this much, and whether it actually shipped. That's not an unpredictable model. That's measuring the wrong unit. Tie spend to the feature and the output and the curve stops looking random.

I got annoyed enough about this that I started building something for it. Solo founder, flagging that up front, and the mods okayed this. It ties Claude Code spend to GitHub and sorts every dollar into shipped, in flight, or never-tied-to-a-PR, by team and repo. The number that caught me even in test data: about a fifth of spend never reaches a merged PR. There's a live demo and a couple of screenshots below if you want to see what that looks like.

But I'm genuinely more interested in how you all handle this. Are you attributing AI spend to teams or features at all, or is it still the bill went up again, oh well? And for anyone who's tried, what broke?

u/Anarkali2000 — 13 days ago

▲ 3 r/tokenomics+2 crossposts

Measure ROI on AI Coding Tools: Tie Your Claude Code Spend to the PRs It Actually Shipped

Hey all, founder here, flagging myself as a vendor. Excited to show off something I've been building. Mods, I checked the rules first.

I'm building TokenSpend. Spending on Claude Code and other coding tools has gone through the roof this year, and everyone can see the bill, but nobody can see what the bill bought. The same dollar can turn into a merged PR, or it can burn in a retry loop that ships nothing, and your invoice looks identical either way. TokenSpend connects your Claude Code spend to GitHub and sorts every dollar into shipped, in flight, or unmatched, broken down by team and repo. In the demo it catches $9,800 of a $48,200 bill that never tied to a merged PR. It also flags cache churn when you're re-paying for context, and model right-sizing headroom, like $42K of flagship spend that Sonnet would have run for about $25K.

I'm building this for FinOps folks dealing with this exact line item, so I want your input shaping it. Screenshots below, and there's a live demo if you'd rather click around. If you've ever stared at an AI bill with no idea whether you got your money's worth, I'd love to hear how you handle it today. All feedback welcome.

u/Anarkali2000 — 8 days ago