Attribution & Finance
FinOps
The discipline of managing cloud (and now AI) spend as a shared, ongoing practice across engineering, finance, and product — bringing accountability to variable, usage-based costs. The FinOps Foundation maintains the standard framework.
Example
Instead of finance discovering the AI overspend at quarter-end, a FinOps practice puts near-real-time spend in front of the engineers who can act on it — so the people generating the cost are the people watching it.
Related terms
Showback
The lighter cousin of chargeback: showing each team what it spent without moving the money. It creates visibility and accountability without the friction of internal billing.
Run-rate
Your current spend projected forward over a full period, usually annualized, to answer "if today's pace held, what would this cost us for the year?"
Unit economics
The cost of AI to serve one unit of your business — one customer, one transaction, one support ticket — so you can tell whether a feature makes or loses money as it scales.
Spend control plane
The layer that governs AI spend across an organization: it issues virtual keys, enforces budgets before calls, attributes every dollar, and produces the audit record. "Observability" tells you what you spent; a control plane decides whether you spend it — the enforcement happens before the call, not after. (This is Tokenality's category.)