The State Of AI Costs In 2025

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.

Google Cloud Functions is now Cloud Run functions: what it is, and what it really costs

Google Cloud Functions became Cloud Run functions in 2024. Here's what the product is, how its per-request pricing actually works, and why AI workloads raise the stakes on every invoice.

AI cost governance: policies to control AI spend

AI cost governance turns unpredictable AI spend into an answerable question — through enforced budget caps, token quotas, prompt caching, and unified allocation that maps every dollar to a team, feature, or customer.

Why is AI so expensive? The real cost drivers of AI

AI is expensive because the model bill is only part of the story. The six real cost drivers — from tokens and infrastructure to adaptation, error-fixing, and energy — and why efficiency doesn't lower the total.

AI budgeting: how to plan and forecast AI spend

AI budgeting means planning, allocating, and forecasting usage-based, multi-provider AI spend that scales with product success. The five steps, driver-based forecasting, and what to do when the budget breaks.