# Token FinOps: Make AI Spend Allocable and Stoppable

> Apply FinOps to token spend: self-owned rate card and price snapshots (private pricing, time-windowed), tag-based allocation and chargeback, three-level daily/monthly cost quotas.

Canonical: https://www.gatellm.io/use-cases/token-finops/

A self-owned rate card turns tokens into real cost, tags land spend on cost centers, and daily / monthly cost quotas turn budgets into request-blocking gates.

## What the community actually complains about
Vendor list price is not your real negotiated cost — discounted and private prices have nowhere to be recorded, so cost reports are fiction; when a model drops its price mid-cycle, historical months get polluted by the re-priced history.
Chargeback is a manual CSV exercise, and overspend is only discovered after the fact.

## How GateLLM does it
GateLLM gives you a self-owned rate card: a hand-entered private price (pinned) becomes authoritative and system refreshes never overwrite it. Each price is a snapshot that takes effect by time window — backfill history or pre-schedule a price cut, without retroactively rewriting cost.
Tags roll keys / key groups into cost centers, and daily / monthly cost quotas inherit key → group → global, judged independently on UTC calendar day and month, blocking the moment either trips.

## 5 levers that actually land
- Self-owned rate card: pinned private price shadows auto, refreshes never overwrite
- Price snapshots cover [own time, next time), backfill history / pre-schedule future
- Three billing modes: per-token, per-call, and per-second (transcription, video generation)
- Tag keys / key groups and aggregate usage & cost by tag
- Daily / monthly cost quotas: three-level inheritance + max fold, 429 quota_exceeded on trip

## FAQ
### How do I enter my negotiated discount without it being overwritten?
Create a manual price snapshot for the model in the console — it is marked pinned (yellow badge). A pinned price becomes current and system refreshes skip that model, never overwriting your manual price; deleting it falls back to the next auto row and self-heals.

### If a model drops its price mid-cycle, do historical months get polluted?
No. Price snapshots are ordered by created_at, each covering only its [own time, next time) window, so a new price affects only the months after it takes effect; you can also pre-schedule the cut for the future or backfill history for exact past-month costing.

- [Full how-to: Pricing & billing (docs)](https://docs.gatellm.io/en/howto/setup-pricing-and-billing)

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- [Your Vendor's List Price Is Not Your Cost: Applying Real FinOps to Token Spend](https://www.gatellm.io/blog/token-finops.md)
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