Stop Profit Leak: A Plain-English Playbook for AI Cost Attribution

Why this matters

Usage pricing only works if you can see cost-to-serve by customer, feature, and agent. Without that, you'll underprice heavy workflows and overcharge light ones. GenAI FinOps posts and vendor guides all point to visibility as step one.

The cost map (copy this)

Vendor → Agent → Signal → Customer with meters like tokens, seconds, queries, minutes, embeddings. Derived KPIs: cost per doc, cost per outcome, margin per customer.

Seven fixes to ship this month

1. 1.Top-N truncation in RAG; cap context length.
2. 2.Prompt budgets per workflow; alert on spikes.
3. 3.Cache deterministic steps.
4. 4.Right-size models for non-critical paths.
5. 5.Batch embeddings; pre-compute heavy transforms.
6. 6.Retry with shorter prompts (guardrail instead of duplicate spend).
7. 7.Kill token-hungry features that customers don't use.

Make it visible

One daily view: Revenue / Costs / Gross Margin (MTD) + Top 5 spikes + Customers <40% margin + Dunning. Teams change behavior when the red lights are obvious.

How UnitPay helps

We ingest vendor usage, attribute cost to each customer & agent, flag anomalies, and tie it to billing so pricing lines up with economics.

Connect your providers—get a live margin map by Friday.