AI Cost Rescue · Fixed-fee audit

Your AI bill went up. Your results didn't.

Companies are canceling AI contracts because the spend ran away and the ROI never showed. The waste is real — but the answer isn't ripping AI out. It's running it right. We find the burn, right-size the architecture, and prove the savings.

Book a 30-min cost review → See the audit →

of AI tasks run on a frontier model that a cheaper one handles fine

~90%

input-cost cut on repeated context with prompt caching alone

0 wks

from kickoff to a costed savings plan in your hands

if we don't find more savings than the audit costs

§ 01

Nobody overspent on purpose. The defaults did it.

Four failure modes account for almost every runaway AI bill we see. None of them require new AI. All of them are fixable in weeks.

01 — UNBOUNDED BURN

Usage scales, nobody's watching

Token cost climbs with every experiment. A $2K/mo pilot quietly becomes $40K/mo, and finance can't forecast it — so they cut the whole line.

02 — PILOT PURGATORY

Seats bought, never operationalized

Licenses and credits sit half-used. It's pure cost with no revenue or savings attached to it — the easiest thing to kill in a budget squeeze.

03 — WRONG MODEL FOR THE JOB

A frontier model doing clerical work

The most expensive model runs tasks a smaller or cached one would do for a fraction of the price — at the same quality, often faster.

04 — NO MEASUREMENT

Can't prove it saved anything

With no baseline and no ROI number, AI looks like cost and nothing else. So when the cut list comes around, it's first to go.

§ 02

Five levers. Same results, a fraction of the spend.

This is the engineering, not the sales pitch. Each lever is something we measure in your stack and implement — with the human kept in the seat on the calls that matter.

Model right-sizing

Route each task to the cheapest model that clears a quality bar, escalating only when it's actually needed. Most work never needs the top tier.

60–90%typical task cost

Prompt caching

Cache the stable context — system prompts, docs, policies — so you stop paying full price to re-send the same tokens on every call.

~90%repeated input cost

Workflow scoping

Replace open-ended "chat with the AI" with narrow, high-frequency workflows. Scoped work is cheap, measurable, and doesn't sprawl.

Boundedkills runaway spend

Human-in-the-loop gating

Let a person handle the ~10% of edge cases instead of throwing more compute at them. Cheaper and higher quality — the fusion thesis in dollars.

Bothcost + quality

The Thriving Index as a $ baseline

Tie usage to a hard cost-and-output baseline and re-score it quarterly. Now the savings are provable — and the line item is un-cancellable.

Proofmakes it stick

§ 03

The AI Cost & ROI Audit

A fixed-fee, two-week engagement. No retainer to sign, no platform to buy. You walk away with a number you can take to your CFO — whether or not you ever hire us again.

What you get

We map your current AI spend against the results it produces, then hand you a right-sized architecture with the savings costed out.

A full breakdown of current AI spend — by tool, model, team, and workflow
The waste, ranked: where the money goes vs. the value it returns
A right-sized architecture — model routing, caching, and scoping mapped to your tasks
A projected savings figure with a 90-day ROI and payback window
A Thriving Index baseline so the gains stay measurable after we leave
A prioritized implementation plan — what to change first, and what it's worth

Fixed fee $2,500 one-time · 2-week turnaround No retainer. No lock-in. Yours to keep.

Savings guarantee

If the audit doesn't identify more annual savings than it costs, you pay nothing. We've yet to see a deployment where it couldn't.

Start the audit →

§ 04

The audit is the front door, not the whole house.

Cutting the bill is where we start because it's where the pain is. But a one-time fix drifts — models change, usage changes, the score moves. So the audit feeds the same loop everything at Artactual runs on.

From rescue to Recursive Merge

The audit gives you the baseline and the quick wins. From there, the same engine that found the savings keeps them from coming back.

You can take the plan and run it yourself — it's yours. Or we implement and hold the line with you, re-scoring every quarter so the bill stays low and the results stay proven.

Audit

Find the burn, right-size the stack, set the $ baseline.

Implement

Routing, caching, and scoping shipped — humans kept in the seat.

Measure

Re-score the Thriving Index. Prove the lift, catch the drift.

Repeat

Every quarter — the gain is the proof it keeps working.

Stop renting AI. Start owning the outcome.

Book a 30-minute cost review. We'll look at your current AI spend together and tell you, straight, whether there's enough waste to be worth an audit. If there isn't, we'll say so.

Book a cost review →