What is Costbase used for?

Costbase is a cost monitoring dashboard for AI products that pulls usage from provider reporting APIs, grouped by app, without a proxy or SDK. It is a good fit for tracking cost of goods for an AI product and finding which app drives the most AI spend.

How much does Costbase cost?

Paid plans for Costbase start at $10 per year, and there is no free plan. A free trial is available.

Is Costbase open source?

No. Costbase is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. In the AI Infrastructure category, open-source options include Pezzo, GPT-Load and Portkey AI Gateway.

What are some alternatives to Costbase?

Costbase competes with Portkey, LangSmith and Vantage.

Costbase: features, pricing and alternatives

About Costbase

Costbase helps teams that build on AI APIs see what their products actually cost to run. You paste one admin key per provider, and it discovers every API key in the account and reads usage from each provider's official reporting API. That means no proxy in your request path, no SDK and no code changes.

Each key can be renamed to the app it powers, such as a transcription app or a support bot, and a single chart then shows cost per day grouped by app, provider, model or key. A year of history is backfilled when you connect. Supported sources include OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, OpenRouter and ElevenLabs, with Gemini and Groq listed as coming soon. The vendor argues that reading billing data is safer than routing production traffic through a gateway.

Costbase is a hosted commercial product that is free to get started; the pricing details are on the vendor's site.

Key features

Reads usage from official provider reporting APIs
No proxy, SDK or code changes
Discovers every API key automatically
Cost grouped by app, provider, model or key
Year of history backfilled on connection
Supports OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and OpenRouter

Good fit for

→Tracking cost of goods for an AI product
→Finding which app drives the most AI spend

Tags: ai-costs; cogs; llm; monitoring; openai; anthropic; finops; dashboard

Costbase: questions and answers

What is Costbase used for?: Costbase is a cost monitoring dashboard for AI products that pulls usage from provider reporting APIs, grouped by app, without a proxy or SDK. It is a good fit for tracking cost of goods for an AI product and finding which app drives the most AI spend.
How much does Costbase cost?: Paid plans for Costbase start at $10 per year, and there is no free plan. A free trial is available.
Is Costbase open source?: No. Costbase is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. In the AI Infrastructure category, open-source options include Pezzo, GPT-Load and Portkey AI Gateway.
What are some alternatives to Costbase?: Costbase competes with Portkey, LangSmith and Vantage.