# Token economics — Use case > Every token counted, tagged, and attributed. Apinizer turns LLM cost into a metric your team can actually optimize — by consumer, by intent, by model. *AI teams · Cost engineering · For AI teams* ## Tokens are a unit of work. Treat them like one. Apinizer's AI Gateway counts prompt tokens, completion tokens, cache savings, and fallbacks per call. Every number rolls up by consumer, intent, model, and time — the numerator and denominator of every cost decision. [Request a demo](https://calendly.com/apinizer/15min) · [Read the docs](https://apinizer.com/developers/docs) --- ## The problem *The problem* ### If you can't attribute a token, you can't optimize a token. Vendor invoices give you a monthly total. The total tells you nothing about which feature, which team, or which prompt drove the spend. Engineers can't optimize what they can't see. Apinizer captures every token at the gateway: prompt and completion, cached and fallback, tagged to consumer, intent, and model — in the same Elasticsearch the rest of the platform uses. --- ## Capabilities ### Per-call token accounting Prompt tokens, completion tokens, total tokens, cost — captured per call. No invoice-driven retrofits at month-end. ### Multi-axis attribution Consumer, project, intent, model, region, env — every call tagged. Aggregation is a saved query, not a finance project. ### Budgets and quotas Hard and soft caps per consumer, project, or intent. Burst allowance for spikes; throttle when the cap hits. ### Cost-per-intent dashboards What does 'summarize this' actually cost? Sum prompt + completion tokens across a million calls; rank by intent, by team, by model. ### Cache and routing savings See savings explicitly — how much would have been spent without the cache, without smart routing. Justify the platform with the numbers it generates. ### Audit-grade evidence Token accounting joins the audit ledger. Finance, engineering, and audit see one truth. --- ## Real-world examples ### Banking **Scenario:** Istanbul bank attributes 100% of AI cost back to product squads **Outcome:** Every squad sees its own AI burn in the existing FinOps dashboard. Cost showbacks land monthly; the central platform reclaims its bonus. **Metric:** 100% attributed ### Insurance **Scenario:** Frankfurt insurer ranks intents by cost-per-intent **Outcome:** 'Summarize claim' costs €0.04 per call; 'analyze adverse signal' costs €1.20. Cheap intents on the small model; expensive intents capped and reviewed. ### Public sector **Scenario:** Paris ministry budgets AI per directorate quarterly **Outcome:** Each directorate has a quarterly cap. Real-time burn dashboards remove all surprise from the close. ### Retail **Scenario:** Madrid retailer quantifies cache savings in the same view as spend **Outcome:** Spend €X; cache saved €Y. Marketing presents the platform's ROI to finance with one chart. **Metric:** Savings visible monthly ### Media **Scenario:** Milan publisher shifts to smaller models for short-form prompts **Outcome:** Cost-per-intent showed short-form prompts were 90% of volume and 30% of cost. Routing shifted them to a 7B model; cost per call dropped 70%. ### Telecom **Scenario:** Amsterdam carrier alarms on burn-rate anomalies **Outcome:** Anomaly detector watches token burn vs. baseline. A prompt loop fired at 3am triggered alarm; on-call killed it in 9 minutes. ### Healthcare **Scenario:** Prague hospital ties AI spend to clinical workflows **Outcome:** Every token attributed to the workflow that triggered it. Workflow owners see cost-per-encounter and optimize their prompts directly. ### Energy **Scenario:** Baku utility caps SCADA-agent token burn per shift **Outcome:** Shift-level quotas. A faulty agent loop would have run up €4k overnight; throttle stopped it at €200; on-call rolled back the deploy. **Metric:** €4k → €200 saved --- ## Recommended modules - [AI Gateway](https://apinizer.com/products/ai-gateway) — Per-call accounting, multi-axis attribution, budgets, quotas — built into every AI call. - [Analytics Engine](https://apinizer.com/products/analytics-engine) — Cost dashboards alongside latency, error rate, and traffic. - [Monitoring](https://apinizer.com/products/monitoring) — Anomaly detection on burn rate; severity-aware alarms on budget thresholds. - [Cache](https://apinizer.com/products/cache) — Cache savings quantified in the same view as model spend. --- ## Resources - [Token accounting overview](https://docs.apinizer.com/en) — Per-call counting, multi-axis attribution, dashboards, and budget enforcement. - [AI Gateway](https://apinizer.com/products/ai-gateway) — Where token accounting lives — alongside routing, caching, and firewalls. - [Analytics Engine](https://apinizer.com/products/analytics-engine) — Cost and savings dashboards in the same Elasticsearch as everything else. - [AI cost control](https://apinizer.com/solutions/ai-cost-control) — The executive view of the same problem. - [Monitoring](https://apinizer.com/products/monitoring) — Burn-rate anomaly detection and severity-aware alarms. - [Architecture overview](https://docs.apinizer.com/en/concepts/architecture) — Where the cost plane sits in the AI lane. --- ## Related use cases - [AI cost control](https://apinizer.com/solutions/ai-cost-control) — For executives - [AI Gateway](https://apinizer.com/solutions/ai-gateway) — For AI teams - [Multi-LLM routing](https://apinizer.com/solutions/multi-llm-routing) — For AI teams - [AI observability](https://apinizer.com/solutions/ai-observability) — For AI teams --- ## Next step *Tokens as units of work* **Count what you spend. Optimize what you count.** A 30-minute walkthrough — per-call accounting, attribution, budgets, dashboards — on a Kubernetes of your choice. [Book a Demo](https://calendly.com/apinizer/15min) · [Read the docs](https://apinizer.com/developers/docs) --- ## Links - Products: https://apinizer.com/products - AI Gateway: https://apinizer.com/products/ai-gateway - Solutions: https://apinizer.com/solutions - Pricing: https://apinizer.com/pricing - Developers: https://apinizer.com/developers - Documentation: https://docs.apinizer.com/index-en - Blog: https://apinizer.com/blog - Contact: https://apinizer.com/company/contact © 2026 Apinizer. All rights reserved.