Attribution & Finance
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?"
Example
You spent $9,500 on AI last month. Your run-rate is roughly $114,000 a year. If last month was up 20% from the month before, the naive run-rate understates where you're heading — which is exactly why run-rate paired with growth rate matters.
Related terms
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.
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.
Cost attribution
Tying each dollar of AI spend to who spent it and why — the person, team, project, or agent responsible — rather than seeing one lump sum on a provider invoice. Attribution is the difference between "we spent $40,000 on AI" and "the research team's document pipeline spent $40,000."