Harness AI Cost Management
Turn AI spend into proven ROI
See what every AI dollar delivers, prove the ROI, and cut waste without slowing adoption.
Sources: GitHub 2025 AI Survey · TechCrunch · Gartner PR 07/20/26 · 2025 DORA Report · McKinsey State of AI 2025
AI spend is exploding while the ROI is unclear
Surprise bills
72% were hit by a surprise AI bill in the last year, with no fast way to trace the cause.
No clear owner
52% have no clear AI cost owner. Engineering spends while finance and platform are accountable.
No real visibility
Only 13% have basic AI cost visibility. Everyone else is reading a total they cannot explain.
Wasted spend
26% of all AI spend is wasted, on overpowered models, retry loops, and bloated prompts.
Sources: Harness State of AI in FinOps · Axios AI Sticker Shock · Gartner PR 06/24/26
One platform for the entire AI cost lifecycle
Harness captures a record of every AI interaction: every request, model, token, cost, owner, and work item in one place, built on OpenTelemetry. That one record lets you attribute, optimize, and govern every AI dollar.
Attribute
Cost attribution
See every AI dollar, mapped to the team, tool, and work.
Optimize
Efficiency & ROI
Connect spend to what it shipped, then find what’s wasted.
Govern
Budgets & guardrails
Set budgets and guardrails before spend scales out of control.
The foundation
A record of every AI interaction, built on OpenTelemetry
Every AI dollar, one connected view
Every source in one place. Coding tools, providers, managed services, custom apps, and agents in one place.
Captured at the source. Activity captured closer to where work happens, not only after the invoice.
Dev and prod, one view. One source of truth across development and production AI spend.
Cost and unit-cost trends. Track cost per token, inference, and session over time, not just a monthly total.
Map spend to your business structure
By ownership. Attribute spend to a business unit, team, or individual developer.
By context. Break cost down by use case, model, agent, or session.
By intent. Trace a dollar to the PR, Jira ticket, request, agent workflow, or business result behind it.
Leadership to line item. Roll up for an exec view, or drill into a single request without switching tools.
Tie every dollar to what it produced
Developer efficiency. Measure cost per PR, commit, Jira ticket, bug fix, or feature, and compare it against ship rate, rework, and delivery velocity.
Agent efficiency. Measure cost per session, served request, resolved ticket, or completed workflow, against escalations avoided, tickets deflected, and outcomes delivered.
Unit economics, not vanity spend. Know the cost of one outcome, so budgets map to the value delivered.
Proven on Harness’ own org. 149% higher PR velocity and 32% less code rework, surfaced by the same granular visibility.
Find waste before it scales
Spot the waste. Spot overpowered models, bloated prompts, retry loops, and abandoned work.
Drill to the source. Drill from spend to session, model, request, and outcome.
Route to the right model. Route work to the right model, compress context, and reduce wasted tokens.
Win back wasted spend. Teams estimate 26% of AI spend is wasted today; this is where you reclaim it.
Control spend without slowing adoption
Budgets everywhere. Budgets by team, developer, use case, agent, or app.
Policies that hold. Policies for model usage, spend thresholds, and approved workflows.
Anomaly alerts. Anomaly alerts for spikes, runaway agents, and unexpected usage.
Governed, not throttled. Keep spend accountable without putting the brakes on AI adoption.
Tracks spend across the AI stack you already run
Harness captures spend from your model providers, coding assistants, clouds, and gateways, built on OpenTelemetry so nothing gets left off the bill.
Frequently asked questions
Harness AI Cost Management connects AI spend across coding tools, model providers, managed services, custom apps, and agents to the teams, work, and outcomes behind it. It unifies spend into one connected view, attributes every dollar to an owner and a work item, ties cost to the software and results it produced, and helps you optimize and govern spend before it scales.
A bill tells you what AI cost. It can’t tell you where the money went, which team or feature drove it, or what it produced. Harness captures the activity behind the spend, every request, model, token, owner, and work item, so you can attribute, explain, and optimize cost instead of just reading a total.
Harness collects activity from developer machines (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot), gateways and proxies (like LiteLLM), SDK and app instrumentation, and provider APIs and logs. It unifies all of it into one connected AI activity record built on OpenTelemetry, captured closer to where the work happens than a monthly invoice.
Yes. Roll spend up by business unit, team, or developer for a leadership view, or drill down by use case, model, agent, or session, all the way to a single PR, Jira ticket, request, or agent workflow.
By tying spend to what it produced. Measure cost per PR, commit, ticket, bug fix, or feature for developers, and cost per session, resolved ticket, or completed workflow for agents, then compare against the outcomes delivered. Run across Harness’ own engineering org, the same visibility surfaced a 149% improvement in PR velocity and a 32% reduction in code rework.
AI Cost Management applies the same discipline Harness Cloud Cost Management brings to cloud spend, attribution, optimization, and governance, to AI spend specifically, from coding tools through production agents. Any tool can show you the bill; Harness shows you where every dollar went.
Ready to see where every AI dollar goes?
Any tool can show you your bill. Harness shows you where every dollar went. Connect your coding tools, providers, and agents, and put every AI dollar on one connected view: attributed, proven, and optimized. Start free, or get a guided walkthrough.