FinOps for AI
For enterprises already running on AWS, Bedrock is a natural first choice. It extends existing security and compliance practice to your AI workloads, keeps procurement simple and strong, and gives your teams a full model portfolio and a whole stack of agent infrastructure in one place.
Like the beginning of any love story, the AI transformation journey is exciting, scary, and unpredictable. Deterra holds your hand along the way.
We believe your confidence in AI should be built in sequence. So should your trust in us.
Instead of claiming to be an expert "governance" layer, we'd rather be your thoughtful cost butler first, and navigate this with you in the right order. Measure, optimize, then govern. Because you can't govern what you haven't measured yet.
Our idealism
“AI is a beautiful balloon floating in the air, full of potential, but often hard to grasp. It needs to be connected to solid ground and held tight, always. Deterra is that tether.”
We started with Amazon Bedrock because AWS has built something genuinely remarkable. The enterprises adopting it at scale deserve an operational layer that matches that ambition. Deterra extends what AWS already does well by adding the cost visibility, optimization, attribution, and governance that anchor real-world AI skyscrapers to Bedrock.
What we keep hearing
Every enterprise running AI on the cloud is having some version of the same conversation. It usually starts as a question and ends as a shrug.
Why the old playbook doesn't work
Cloud FinOps was built to meter deterministic consumption. A vCPU-hour costs what a vCPU-hour costs. Infrastructure is provisioned by a small number of engineers, under a fixed budget, and it serves the whole business.
Tokens behave nothing like that. Everyone consumes them, everywhere, inside the org and out. And no two consumers cost the same.
One user summarizes a paragraph. The next pastes a 200-page contract.
Same feature. Same model. Same button. Two orders of magnitude apart.
No engineer made that choice. The user did.
A system prompt that quietly grew. A max-tokens ceiling nobody revisited. Extended thinking left on for a workload that never needed reasoning.
Extra cost stacks up quietly. You see the number. You don't see why.
A vCPU-hour is a unit of resource. You know how to pay for it, meter it, control it.
A token is a decision to spend, made by any user, at any time. You pay for it. You don't control it.
The measurement gap
Each console serves a different team. None of them serve finance.
Runs a day behind. Can't tell Marketplace-billed models from native ones without custom filtering.
Shows invocations and latency. Does not show cost.
Shows invoice totals. Does not show tokens.
That's the surface. Underneath it, Bedrock's billing carries a set of specific subtleties.
Charges filed under product codes you'd never think to look for...
Discounts baked into the rate instead of shown as discounts...
Premiums that never surface at the point of decision...
Billing units that change by service, and never reference each other...
and it keeps going...
The gap between your estimate and your invoice isn't closing. It widens with every release.
What Deterra does
Your cost signals sit in different places, speak different units, and change every time AWS ships. Chasing them down is unglamorous, sweaty, exhausting work. It's the first thing we built.
One shows spend trend in real time. One shows the final dollar you pay. The gap in between is where the money hides. It's the first thing you see in Deterra.
Each token mapped to the unit that produced it. A user, agent, feature, prompt... metrics your business already runs on. Every token accounted for. Unit economics on solid ground.
Once you can see where the money goes, you can see where it shouldn't. Model tiers, cache behavior, configuration nobody revisited since launch.
Once you know your real consumption shape, you can buy it cheaper. Provisioned throughput, batch, and Flex only pay off if you know what you actually use.
Allowlists, ceilings, limits, agent RBAC. Set from what you measured, not from what you guessed.
Where we sit
Many tools touch the same telemetry. Traces, tokens, models, users, sessions. What separates them is the question they're built to answer.
Legacy FinOps renovates a platform built for a different cost primitive. Emerging AI FinOps tools go wide across model providers, stop at token count estimates, and reach for control before they've measured anything. The billing platforms focus on the model-direct sell side.
Deterra stubbornly ploughs the other way. From token counts, through logs and metrics, all the way down into the weeds of the billing file. One hyperscaler at a time. Building trust the only way it can be built: one correct number after another.
Deliberate order
We start with visibility and visibility only. Read-only. No proxy, no prompt caching. We connect through a single cross-account IAM role, scoped to the minimum permissions we need.
Reconciled cost across every signal. Full attribution to business metrics. The gap between estimated and billed cost, surfaced, analyzed, proven. And then, we start to optimize.
Every optimization starts as a conversation. What's possible, what suits your use case, what survives simulation. Then we implement at scale.
Agent RBAC, policy enforcement, model allowlists, spend ceilings. One bill, one trail, and an audit history that compounds from day one.
We're deliberate on sequence and we take our time to build trust, because that's the only order this works in.
Who it's for
Organizations that have moved from Bedrock experimentation into production, where responsible AI adoption means the same financial rigor they already apply to the rest of their cloud.
AI spend is a strategy question wearing a finance costume. When every dollar traces to a feature, a team, and a customer, the roadmap conversation stops being a matter of opinion.
Justify it, or cut it, but do it with evidence. Attribution turns a number nobody can defend into a set of decisions you can stand behind in a board meeting.
Return needs a denominator. Consumption is easy to count. Tying it to what the business got back is the hard part, and it's the part nobody built.
Deterra brings the CEO, CTO, and CFO to one table with Grounded Token Economics, and lets them set AI strategy together, from the same numbers.
Early access
We're working with a small group of AWS partners and enterprise teams running production Bedrock workloads. If that's you, we want to hear what you're running into, and show you what we've built so far.
We'll reach out personally. No drip campaigns, no automation.
Got it. Expect a note from us soon.
Something went wrong. Email us at support@deterra.ai instead.