Technology spend observability and optimisation

A cost for every part, people included

The answer is to give every part of your technology its own unit of cost, which we call a cost token. A seat, a device, a gigabyte stored, a thousand AI tokens, an hour of an engineer's time. Each has an agreed rate, and every team's use is counted in those units. FinOps calls this unit economics, and the TBM standard sorts the costs so shared ones can be split fairly. For AI, the FinOps Foundation calls this method token economics, or tokenomics: metering AI use by the token and tying it to the value it creates. The same idea works across all your technology. Read more about tokenomics.

People are part of it. A system that needs two engineers to keep it running costs far more than its licence. Leave people out and the cheapest-looking system is often the most expensive one.

With FinOps and these cost tokens, spend management covers all your technology (on-premise, cloud, SaaS and AI) in one view.

What getting it wrong costs

1. 1

   Wrong costs lead to wrong prices

   If you do not know what it costs to deliver a product or a service, you cannot price it well. Price too low and you lose margin on every sale; price too high and you lose the deal. Across a year of sales, small errors in cost become large amounts of lost revenue.

2. 2

   Bills nobody planned

   When what you buy no longer matches what you use, the bills grow without anyone noticing: idle cloud capacity, seats for people who have left, tools doing the same job, AI left running.

3. 3

   Departments judged on the wrong numbers

   When shared costs are split by headcount or by habit rather than by use, the numbers mislead. A team that uses little can carry a large share and look like it performs poorly, while a heavy user that produces little looks profitable. Budgets, hiring and investment are then based on the wrong numbers.

An illustrative example. A shared platform costs 100,000 a year. Split by headcount, Sales (40 of 100 staff) pays 40,000 and the Data team (5 staff) pays 5,000. Measured by use, the Data team runs 70% of the workload and Sales 5%. Sales is carrying 35,000 a year that is not its own, and the Data team looks 65,000 cheaper than it is.

How spend is kept under control

See the costs

Every team sees what it spends, in units it recognises, and every AI use has a cost per answer or per request. Bills from every vendor are brought into one layout, so they can be compared directly.

Find unexpected changes

Alerts for unusual increases, alerts for AI costs that rise too fast, and a monthly check of every cost against its agreed limit. An AI service that nobody is watching can build up a large bill very quickly when use grows or a process repeats itself by mistake. The aim is to know within the hour, not when the monthly bill arrives.

Control the spend

An owner for every cost, agreed limits and budget limits that your teams switch on, and a 12-month renewals calendar with notice dates, so nothing renews without anyone noticing.

Optimise the spend

• Savings ranked by value and effort, starting with changes you can make within 30 days without changing a contract, each with an owner.
• Unused seats found and reclaimed; tools doing the same job spotted before the next renewal.
• Committed spend compared with pay-as-you-go, so you commit where it saves money and stay flexible where it does not.
• AI costed per use and modelled at half, double and five times today's use, so scaling up is a decision, not a surprise.

Start small, show results, then expand

This happens step by step, not all at once. The FinOps Foundation's advice is to start small, and grow in scale, scope, and complexity as the value shows (FinOps Foundation maturity model, read 04/10/2026). Its Crawl, Walk, Run stages describe the path:

1. 1

   Crawl: one focused area

   Pick one business unit, or one kind of bill such as cloud or AI. Bring its bills into one layout, agree owners and cost units, show each team its costs, and agree up front how you will know it worked.

2. 2

   Walk: expand what works

   Add business units and bill types one at a time. Switch on alerts and limits, and hold a monthly review with finance and technology together.

3. 3

   Run: the whole organisation

   Costs, units and rates cover all your technology, much of it automated, and they feed into pricing and budgeting. Not every area needs to reach Run; go as far as the value justifies.

FOCUS is the starting point. FOCUS is the FinOps Foundation's open, standard layout for billing data, covering AI, cloud, SaaS and data centre costs; version 1.4 is current, and the major cloud providers already export in it (FOCUS, read 04/10/2026). With every bill in one layout, the cost tokens above can be counted the same way everywhere.

Governance comes first

Spend management depends on governance. The register of every system and AI use, each with an owner, is what lets a cost be traced to the team that caused it. Without it, costs end up in a shared total that nobody is responsible for. Read why governance is the foundation.

Check your own setup

A free self-check you can run on your own setup in about 20 minutes: 25 plain questions, each answered yes, partly or no. Your score is calculated for you, and every gap comes with what to look at first. It works for any size, from one person to a global company; questions that only matter above a certain size are marked, and you can skip them.

No sign-up and no email address. Download it and keep it.

Which service does this

The AI and technology cost review gives you this view once, in ten working days. Cloud spend management, AI spend management and technology spend management set it up for your team to run, with an optional monthly service if you would rather we run it. Monthly reporting keeps the review's results up to date. Typical prices for all of them are on our Pricing page.

We never work inside your systems. Your teams switch on what is agreed, and we measure the result from the exports you send.