How we cut our AI spend by 40% without cutting a single teams access

Wanted to share what worked for us since I see a lot of posts here about AI costs spiraling.

Context: we use Claude, GPT, and a few other AI tools across different teams. About 6 months ago finance came to us with the AI is eating our budget talk. Every team had their own billing portal, different units (tokens, characters, requests), and we had no unified view of what we were actually spending.

The instinct was to just cap everyone. But before we did that, we decided to get visibility first.

We started using aicosts.ai to pull all the AI billing into one place. The setup was about 10 minutes - you upload invoices or push events via API. The immediate win was per-team, per-model spend across all our providers in one dashboard.

What we found:

• One team was burning 3x what anyone expected because they defaulted to the most expensive model for everything
• A few teams had Pro/Plus accounts that were barely being used
• We were double-paying for some tools because different teams bought separately

The fix wasnt cutting AI - it was routing. We moved simple tasks to cheaper models (where quality was fine), consolidated redundant accounts, and set up budget alerts at 50%/80%/100% per provider. Net result: 40% cost reduction, no quality complaints, no team got cut off.

The lesson: if youre about to cut AI access, get visibility first. You might be cutting the wrong things.