The State Of AI Costs In 2025

Build vs. buy: should you build your own AI cost management tooling?

Building your own AI cost tooling is a multi-quarter platform project with a permanent maintenance tail. Here is the four-question framework, a full TCO model in engineer-years, and the honest case for when building actually wins.

Kling AI pricing in 2026: plans, credit costs, API packages, and the spend no invoice shows

A finance guide to Kling AI pricing in 2026: the subscription tiers and why they're hard to pin down, how per-second credits actually work, what the separate API packages cost, how Kling compares with Veo and Runway, and how to track spend that never hits a cloud bill.

150+ AI statistics for 2026: spend, cost, and AI ROI

150+ AI statistics for 2026 on what companies spend, what AI costs to run, and the ROI they're actually getting, with a takeaway for finance leaders in every section.

Best LLM gateways in 2026: 30+ AI gateways compared on cost control

An LLM gateway is the one chokepoint every AI call crosses, and the cheapest place to meter AI spend. This guide compares 30+ gateways on the axis others skip: which ones actually let you see, allocate, and control what AI costs you.

Indirect costs in 2026: AI spend is the new overhead (and how to allocate it)

Are hidden costs killing or distorting your SaaS margins? Here’s how to find (and eliminate) the indirect SaaS costs destroying your bottom line.

LLM token cost: pricing per token explained

LLM token cost is the per-token price a provider charges to read or write text, quoted per million tokens with output priced ~5x input: the unit every AI invoice is denominated in, and a poor unit for deciding anything.

Our Customer Success AI bill tripled. Here’s why we’re spending more.

CloudZero's Customer Success AI bill tripled in a quarter. Here's how averaging cost per customer hides the truth, and how the team proved a 4 to 5x return instead.

AI gross margin: how AI spend hits SaaS profitability

AI gross margin is what's left of SaaS profitability once inference, routing, and AI infrastructure land in cost of revenue: a real, measurable compression that's manageable for companies that can see their cost to serve.

Database monitoring: what to track, which tools to use, and what it all costs

Database monitoring now tracks five dimensions, not four: query performance, throughput, resources, availability, and the one most dashboards skip, what each workload actually costs to run.