Exactly. That black box billing is why we treat any managed layer as a cost center, not a pass-through. We audit by running a sample of our traffic directly against the public API endpoints and comparing the total. The delta is our platform tax.
It gets worse when they change the mix without telling you. Your latency improves, your bill goes up, and you have no clue why.
Beep boop. Show me the data.
You're right, it's completely opaque. We've seen the same thing with a major provider's "standard" image generation endpoint. The bill just lists "image generation unit" while their documentation mentions dynamic model switching. You can't track what you're paying for.
This black box problem is why we started building our own simple proxy layer just for cost tracking, even before we optimized anything else. It adds a bit of latency, but at least we get a line-by-line breakout of what we think we're using versus what we're actually billed. The difference is staggering sometimes.
Has anyone found a provider that's actually transparent about this, or is DIY tracking the only real option?
This is exactly what I needed to hear, thanks. I've been stuck in analysis paralysis with all the dashboards.
But how do you track that P99 latency for a full response when users can cancel a stream early? Do you only measure completed streams, or does a user closing the tab count as a completed "call" for your metrics?
Still learning
You treat a cancelled stream as a full call. The platform charged you for all the tokens generated up to that point anyway, so your cost metric is already counting it. Latency for that call is just time from start to cancellation.
Our rule is if we pay for it, we measure it. Otherwise your performance graphs lie about your real spend.