Mathew PaquetTemplate · 4 min read
The One-Hour AI Bill Audit
One sheet and one hour: list every AI line you pay for, then find three numbers. Jobs paid twice, cost per active person, and the share of the bill that runs on a meter.
Most AI plans now sell you two things. A seat: a flat monthly price for one person, like a taxi's flat fare that covers the first few miles. And a meter: what you pay once you go past what the plan includes.
The sticker prices have basically converged. ChatGPT runs from about $8 to $20, $100 and $200 a month. Claude is $20, $100, $200. The difference is the meter, and it goes by a few names:
And nobody owns the bill. AI mostly comes in through expense reports. Zylo, which sells software for managing software spending, says ChatGPT is now the most expensed app in its data, and business teams, not IT, control 81% of software spending.
This sheet gets you three numbers in an hour. If your whole AI bill is $60 a month, you need ten minutes, not software. It starts to matter once a few people buy their own plans.
The real problem isn't the price. It's that nobody owns the bill.Job: [CHAT / WRITING / CODE / IMAGES / MEETING NOTES]
Monthly cost: [$]
People who used it in the last 30 days: [NUMBER] of [PEOPLE WHO HAVE IT]
Metered: [YES / NO]
A bundle is more than one job. The X Subscription puts a chatbot, a coding tool and X Premium into one plan. Write each job it does, or the overlap hides inside one line.
Jobs that show up more than once, on the made-up team of eight:
The rule: keep one tool per job, unless someone can tell you in one sentence why they need the second.
Keeping: [TOOL]
Second tool kept because: [ONE SENTENCE, OR CANCEL IT]
A bundle can be a good deal. If one plan replaces three, great. The problem is buying it on top of the three.
Divide what you pay by the people who used it in the last 30 days. Many plans show usage in their settings: on Claude, Settings > Usage; The X Subscription shows remaining usage in settings. For other tools, ask each person.
Worked example. The team pays $200 a month for AI, and only five of the eight people used anything last month. $200 divided by 5 is $40 per active person, not $25.
Add up every metered line: usage credits, top-offs, API charges, outside models billed by usage. Divide by the total bill. If the meter lines on our bill came to $50 out of $200, a quarter of the bill is spending nobody chose.
It's the line that grows on its own, so it gets one owner, and a monthly limit wherever the vendor lets you set one. Accenture, as reported by 404 Media, now funds $29 a month per person for Claude for many employees, and anything above that is charged to a project or team. A flat amount per person, and the meter charged to the work that uses it.
Owner of the meter: [ONE NAME]
Monthly limit: [$] on [TOOL], where the vendor lets you set one
Pricing pages checked on: [DATE]
Once a month, open the pricing page of every tool you keep. The price might not move. What it includes might. Agents, software that runs tasks on its own, don't sit in seats: the ones a business builds usually run through the API, billed by the token.
Do this today. Pull ninety days of AI charges and write the job next to each line.
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Pull the last ninety days of AI charges today and write the job each one does next to it.
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