Gartner forecasts $2.6 trillion in global AI spend this year. Most of it lands in invoices that don’t connect dollars to the developers who spent them, the customers they served, or the features they shipped. AI billing is a mess.
CloudZero is the financial control plane for AI spend. Three capabilities, available today, reveal the by-customer, feature, and developer ROI of AI:
1. Real-time Spend: Capture every dollar spent on AI, at the source.
2. AI Hub: Natural-language analysis of your AI spend, powered by Claude.
3. A rebuilt platform UI: Faster everywhere, with dark mode.
1. Real-Time AI Spend
The problem. AI providers know what your engineer prompted. They don’t know what they were building, why, or whether it shipped. The bill that arrives at the end of the month simply can’t connect the dots: line items by API key, not by customer, project, or business outcome.
The solution. Go to the source. CloudZero’s Real-time AI Spend agent installs on the engineer’s machine or connects to your LLM gateway, tracks AI spend in real time, and feeds it into our allocation engine.
The agent captures the data. The allocation engine does the work that matters. We’ve spent a decade building that engine that processes 14 trillion billing events a year for hundreds of enterprise customers. Adding AI is the latest dimension; the discipline is the same.
2. AI Hub
The problem. Connecting cloud and AI spend to business outcomes used to require engineering and finance expertise. You needed someone who could read a billing record and also care about COGS. Most companies don’t have that person, and the ones that do can’t scale them.
The solution. AI Hub closes that gap. Through our Claude Code Plugin (an MCP server, prepackaged Claude Skills, a curated prompt catalog, and support for twelve other coding agents including Gemini and Copilot), finance, engineering, and product teams can ask cost questions in natural language and get answers grounded in your CloudZero data.
Identify the who, what, when, and why in seconds. The full loop runs in minutes instead of days.
3. A Rebuilt Platform UI
AI has dramatically shortened the timelines on which teams innovate. It’s not enough that we ship new features to give teams visibility; the platform itself must move at the speed of AI. So, we rebuilt CloudZero’s frontend, making it dramatically faster for us to deliver new capabilities to our customers.
In the 7 months since we started building CZNext, we’ve merged nearly 1,000 PRs from 18 engineers, shipped 20+ major features, and are currently delivering ~30 improvements per week. The new platform ships at roughly 4x the terminal velocity of the codebase it replaced, with half the time to merge.
In time-based user experience terms, in our new UI:
- Pages load 28-61% faster
- JavaScript execution is 85% faster, so filters, sorts, and table interactions respond without lag
- Warm load times are 14-77% faster
Built with AI, for AI, running and adapting at the speed of AI. The same bet our customers are making, we made on ourselves first. And, if I may say, it looks awfully stylish.
What this adds up to
AI spend is growing too fast for older tools. We built the financial control plane so figuring out the unit economics of AI doesn’t require a dedicated team and a year of integration work. Real-time data, AI-tool access through MCP and our cost-analyst skills, and a system that’s been doing cost allocation for a decade.
Companies that know what AI costs to ship a feature, serve a customer, or generate revenue will compound their bets. The ones that don’t will keep guessing.
