About
The independent, cross-vendor auditor for AI spend.
The independent, cross-vendor auditor for AI spend. It connects every dollar a company spends on AI to what its engineering teams actually ship, with a proof level on every number.
Companies now spend real money on AI — seats, tokens, and a long tail of charges that never reach a vendor console. Almost nobody can say what that spend actually bought. The tools that track SaaS spend stop at the invoice, and the vendors selling the seats have no reason to tell you which ones sit idle. Spendassay exists to close that gap.
Independence is the whole point. We don't resell AI tools, we don't take a cut of your spend, and the audit is read-only by architecture — it cannot write to the systems it reads. That's what lets us say the uncomfortable thing: which seats to cut, which renewals to renegotiate, and where the spend simply isn't working. Every figure shows its formula, so the number survives the second question in a board meeting.
How we make money
Subscription only. Nothing that moves with your bill.
Anyone claiming independence should have to say how they get paid, because that is where the incentive to shade a number lives. We charge a flat price per covered engineer per month, and that is the whole model. We take no commission on your AI spend, no referral fee from any vendor, and no share of what an audit recovers.
The last one matters most. A contingency fee would pay us more for a bigger recovery number, which is exactly the pressure that turns an estimate into a headline. Our revenue does not change based on what your audit concludes, so the number we publish is the number we found. The same commitment is in the terms of service, not just on this page.
What we refuse to do
An auditor is defined by its limits.
Three of these cost us features people ask for, and we hold them anyway. They are enforced in the code, not in a policy document.
- No individual rankings. Nothing renders for a group smaller than eight people. There is no per-person view to unlock, so there is nothing to turn on.
- No code, prompts, or message content. We read counts, dates and invoices. Measurement only needs metadata, so metadata is all we take.
- No number without its formula. Every figure carries a proof level and opens to show the rows it came from. The full methodology is public, including the research that cuts against us.
Who's behind it
Built by an operator who got the bill.
Spendassay started from the ordinary version of this problem: an AI bill growing faster than anyone could explain, spread across vendor consoles that each showed one slice of it, and no way to answer a board member asking what it bought. The tools for tracking software spend stopped at the invoice. The productivity tools measured output and never touched the cost. Nothing joined the two, so the honest answer was a shrug, and a shrug is not an answer you can take to a renewal.
Patrick Lambert
Founder
Questions about the audit?
We answer in plain language — about the methodology, a security review, or your account.