Most tools report the bill.
CapHound decides it.
When AI usage grows faster than budgets, approvals, and reporting can keep up, another dashboard doesn't help. The control has to happen before the spend — and leave a record you own.
Observability vs. control
Knowing what you spent isn't the same as controlling it.
Cost dashboards read the invoice after the provider sends it. By then the spend already happened. CapHound makes the call while it's still a decision.
The dashboard approach
- Tells you what you already spent
- Alerts fire after the threshold is crossed
- Numbers reconciled, and estimated, at month-end
- Costs trapped inside one more dashboard
CapHound
- Decides what you spend, request by request
- Spending stops at the limit — no overrun to alert on
- Every figure is a recorded event, never an estimate
- Records flow to your warehouse, Slack, and audit trail
The difference
The decision happens at the request — not the report.
Every request is checked against your budgets and policies in the moment, the call is made, and it's written to the record with the policy that made it. Not blocked-or-allowed — the full position: downgraded, rerouted, paced, or stopped, with the reason and the cost effect attached.
- Five policy types, evaluated on every single request
- Each decision recorded with its policy, reason, and cost effect
- The runaway loop is stopped — not discovered on next month's invoice
decision-streampolicy:any · env:productiongpt-4o · contract-analysis
budget-limit · legal-tech monthly
gpt-4o → gpt-4o-mini · customer-support
downgrade-rule · non-critical traffic
claude-sonnet · doc-extract
routing-preference · EU data residency
o1-preview · engineering-sandbox
model-restriction · approved models only
batch-embed · growth-experiments
rate-limit · 20 req/min non-prod
Every request, evaluated against your policies
$2,144 never spent this month
Your data, not our dashboard
Every decision becomes a record you own.
The records CapHound writes don't live behind one more login. They land in your warehouse in FOCUS 1.0 format, in your team's Slack and Jira, in your Datadog and audit trail — and your AI agents can read them directly. The dashboard is where you configure; the records are the product.
Warehouse push is FOCUS 1.0 conformant — lands in Snowflake, BigQuery, S3, or any destination that accepts a push, and loads into your FinOps pipeline unmodified.
What changes once it's on.
Four outcomes, from the same control model — every one backed by a record.
An owner on every dollar
Cost attribution by feature, team, and customer — each budget carrying a named owner and an approval path. Nobody's spend is anonymous.
Spending stops at the limit
Five policy types — budget limits, model downgrades, routing, model restrictions, rate limits — evaluated on every request, before the bill.
Decisions in minutes
Increases and exceptions approved with one tap in Slack or one click in email. Rejections ask for a reason. Exceptions revert themselves.
A receipt, not a report
Each month: what was prevented, what was decided, who decided it — every figure a recorded event you can forward upward without a meeting.
Control AI spend before the bill arrives.
We map CapHound to your AI usage, ownership, and reporting requirements — then the records start flowing the same hour.