FinOps for AI · the independent AI-spend auditor

Find the AI spend you're not using — across every vendor at once.

Connect your AI vendors read-only in about 10 minutes. Get a line-by-line list of the spend that bought nothing, with the receipt for each line.

Cross-vendorMetadata only — never your code or promptsRead-only audit
AI Spend Snapshot · Meridian demoSample · synthetic co.
Recoverable per month Counted
$6,361/mo
the counted waste that repeats every month · each dollar counted once
Seat utilization
64%
208 of 323 paid seats active
Renews 14 Aug 2026 Counted
$1,860/mo
ChatGPT · 62% of paid seats idle
62 unused ChatGPT seats
$1,860/mo
53 unused GitHub Copilot seats
$1,007/mo
Shadow AI on personal cards (4 tools)
$3,000/mo
26 engineers carry redundant coding assistants
$494/mo
Meridian is deliberately untidy, so the audit has something to show. A typical audit recovers 10 to 15% of seat and subscription spend, not what you see here.
Meridian Software · synthetic 420-person demo · month ending 30 Jun 2026every number opens its evidence

Every number says how we know it

Every figure carries a proof level, so you know how much guessing sits behind it.

Counted

Read straight off a bill, a seat list or a usage report. No guessing. Two people pulling the same numbers would get the same answer.

Compared

The difference between two similar teams inside your own company, over the same period. Real signal, but a difference is not proof of a cause.

Estimated

Worked out from assumptions you can see and change. Always shown as a range, never a single number.

Across the public benchmarks and audits we've run, 10 to 15% of seat and subscription spend is typically recoverable within 30 days, neutral across every AI vendor. If most of your bill is API tokens, the lever is routing instead, and we size that separately. Routing and throttling are Control, a separate opt-in plan (private beta) that runs on your own provider keys. The audit never routes anything. Recovery is counted. Productivity is estimated and shown as a range.

The long version: the complete guide to AI cost management, what the published research says about AI and developer speed, and how we grade a number in three proof levels.

Connect read-only connectors or a CSVAudit every dollar against what shipsRecover the waste, tracked to the invoiceMonitor usage and spend, with alerts on drift
See how it works →

Built for the whole buying committee

One audit, five readers.

Each one sees the number that matters to them, with the proof behind it.

Founder / Exec

The AI spend you can get back — same-day Snapshot, no rollout, no workshop.

See what founders get →

CFO / Finance

An AI cost report you can take to your board — one page showing what your AI tools cost and what you get back. Every line shows its math.

See what finance gets →

Engineering leader

Walk into the budget talk with proof instead of opinions — which tools earn their seats, which don't. Team level only, no individual rankings, ever.

See what engineering gets →

Procurement / FinOps

Every renewal, with proof of the seats nobody opens and a specific dollar amount to ask the vendor for.

See what procurement gets →

IT / Security

Shadow AI, priced. Tools bought on personal cards, outside of purchasing, found in card and sign-in records. Read-only, metadata-only, no agents on anyone's laptop.

See what IT gets →

The strongest single move

Cutting seats and cutting price are two asks. Blend them and you pay for it.

Cutting seats reduces the number of licenses. A discount reduces the price of each one. Ask for both at once and the vendor answers the expensive request with the cheap one.

On 100 Cursor seats where only 60 are used, cutting first then negotiating 20% off lands at $1,920/mo — versus $3,200/mofor a blended “20% off.” Same discount, $15,360 a year apart.

How procurement uses it →

Questions finance and security ask first

The honest answers — the same facts as our security posture.

Is it really free?

Yes. Snapshot is a free, one-time AI cost report — read-only, no card, just a free account. You get one page with your top recoverable-spend findings, each carrying its proof level: counted, compared, or estimated. Paid plans add continuous findings, more surfaces, and recovery step-by-step instructions your own admins run.

What do you connect to?

Read-only connectors to your AI vendors and the systems that record their spend — seat invoices, API token spend, and infra, alongside usage data. Copilot, Cursor, Claude, the API platforms, and the rest. You can also explore the whole product on synthetic demo data before connecting anything.

Can you see our code?

No. We read metadata and spend — seat rosters, last-activity, token counts, invoices — never the contents of your repositories or prompts. No code, no message bodies. The constraints are the product: they're what let you deploy Spendassay without a six-month security review.

How is this different from a SaaS-spend tool?

Zylo and Vendr show what you spent. We show which seats nobody opened, which tokens bought nothing, and what to cancel.

How long does setup take?

10 minutes to connect. Same-day Snapshot. Cash back on the next invoice. Productivity signal after one quarter. Or explore the whole product on demo data first, with no signup.

Is my data safe?

We never receive code, prompts, or message bodies — only seat lists, timestamps, and invoices. The full data boundary and SOC 2 status are on our security page.

The constraints are the product

An auditor is defined by what it refuses to do.

Four hard limits, built in underneath the screen — not settings anyone can turn off.

No individual rankings.

We only ever report on teams of eight people or more. There is no individual view to unlock, and a team smaller than eight rolls up. This is not a policy you have to trust us on. There is nothing to turn on.

No code or content, ever.

We read seat lists, last activity, invoices and token counts — a token is the unit AI vendors bill for, roughly a few characters of text. Never your prompts, your messages or your code.

Read-only, by design.

We cannot merge a PR, cancel a seat or change a license. Recoveries run as step-by-step instructions your own admins carry out. An auditor that can change the books is not an auditor.

Any 'ships faster' claim comes with the bugs and rework it caused.

When work ships faster, something usually gets worse: rework, bugs per PR, incidents. We show the gain next to what the speed cost you, on the same screen. A speed number without its cost is propaganda.

How every number is built →

See what your AI budget is hiding.

Free, one-time, no card. Or open the sample report without signing up.

Read-only connectors · No code or prompt content · Team-level only