The method, in the open
Judge the method before you judge me.
No gated PDF, no email wall. The checklist, the formula, and the audit approach are here — the same ones I use on every engagement.
The 12-leak checklist
- 01
Spend not located
Provider invoices, card sweeps, and shadow-AI subscriptions that never reach one ledger.
- 02
Workload inventory missing
Models used, tokens in/out, and latency needs per feature — guessed, not measured.
- 03
No caching coverage
System prompts, RAG contexts, and repeated prefixes re-sent every call at full price.
- 04
Batch eligibility ignored
Non-real-time jobs left on sync endpoints — a straight discount unclaimed (vendor-documented ~50% off on deferrable workloads).
- 05
Model-fit mismatch
Flagship models doing Haiku-grade work because nobody set a routing rule.
- 06
RAG inefficiency
Chunk sizes, retrieved-context bloat, and redundant re-embedding on every query.
- 07
Agent retry storms
Retry loops, runaway iterations, and missing max-token caps inflating every run.
- 08
Failover double-billing
Fallback paths that both fire, or primary and backup billed for the same request.
- 09
Commitment under-use
Reserved capacity or committed tiers sitting idle against bursty real usage.
- 10
No monitoring
Spend that drifts for weeks before anyone notices because nothing watches the trace.
- 11
Tooling overlap
Two observability platforms doing the same job, or a dashboard nobody reads.
- 12
Features that shouldn't exist
AI features whose unit economics are negative — the best fix is sometimes deletion.
The ROI formula
The ROI formula, stated plainly
Net annual value = (measured annual savings + labor hours saved × loaded rate) − annual fees. Every input is labelled measured or estimated, and any estimate carries ±20% sensitivity. The confidence factor (1.0 measured, 0.8 vendor-doc rate on your logs, 0.5 benchmark-only) is an internal judgment heuristic until calibrated against real audits — it is not a promise.
Proof by method
Want this run on your own stack?
The Snapshot applies the same checklist to your bills. Book one and you'll see the leaks named, not theorized.