Asato vs AI cost management tools

An AI cost tool starts from what it was built to see: the payment, the cloud bill, or the traffic routed through it. Asato starts from your people and contracts. It reads each vendor's seats, credits and tokens into one ledger, proposes an owner for each line, and writes the budget you approve into the vendor's own limits, where the vendor allows it. Each tool starts from one part of an AI bill. Asato ties the bill to people and contracts, in the record that holds your software and hardware.

Headline on the page: Asato vs AI cost tools.

Line under the headline: Pick one AI seat and one API key. Ask each tool who owns both.

This page compares Asato with three kinds of tool that show what AI costs, not with one product: spend and expense tools, cloud cost tools and AI gateways. Each kind is described from a public, neutral definition, named and linked below. Individual products differ. What the page says of Asato is what Asato's own pages say. Each of these tools has a job of its own (paying, running a cloud, carrying traffic), and the page does not tell a reader to replace one.

The short answer

An AI cost tool. Starts from what it was built to see: the payment, the cloud bill, or the traffic routed through it.
Asato. Starts from your people and contracts. It reads each vendor's seats, credits and tokens into one ledger, proposes an owner for each line, and writes the budget you approve into the vendor's own limits, where the vendor allows it.
In short. Each tool starts from one part of an AI bill. Asato ties the bill to people and contracts, in the record that holds your software and hardware.

The difference

Each tool starts from one part of the bill. Asato starts from people and contracts.

One ledger across vendors. A payment, a cloud bill and a gateway each start from one part of what AI costs. Asato reads seats, credits and tokens from each vendor's own records into one ledger.
An owner from your own records. Asato proposes an owner for each seat, key and agent from your directory and contracts, and asks that person to accept.
One policy, in each vendor's limits. You set one budget policy. Once a named person approves, Asato writes the limit into each vendor's own control, where the vendor allows it, and reads it back.

How each is built

Page heading: Built differently. A knowledge graph, an intelligence engine and AI agents, where each AI cost tool is built on one kind of record.

	An AI cost tool	Asato
How your data is held	By kind: expense records, cloud billing data, or the requests that pass through the gateway.	The Asset Knowledge Graph. It contextualizes and connects your records: each asset is linked to its owner, its contract and its cost, however many systems disagreed.
How an insight is produced	By kind: expense reports, cloud cost reports, some with statistical models or machine learning, or a gateway's view of its traffic.	The Data Intelligence Engine. Its data products use rules, machine learning and language models to turn the graph into recommendations, each with a price and an owner.
How a change is made	By kind: an approval on an expense, a change in the cloud account, or a block at the gateway.	Agentic AI, with a human in the loop. Agents carry out each fix once a person you name approves it, log who, what, when and why, and keep watching for new waste.

The first column says what tools of these kinds are built around, by definition. Some products add machine learning or AI of their own. Customer data never trains any model at Asato. The three parts of the Asato platform: Link: Asset Knowledge Graph, Think: Data Intelligence Engine, Execute: Agentic AI Solutions.

AI cost management tools: what each kind does well, and where its definition stops

Spend and expense tools

Gartner describes expense management software as simplifying how an organization reimburses and reconciles expenses: reports, approval, reimbursement and accounting. Source: Gartner, market page for expense management software.

Products Gartner lists in this market include Concur Expense, Ramp, Brex and Navan. Products are named as examples of the kind and are not graded here.

What they do well:

Show what was paid to each AI vendor, on a card or an invoice.
Approve and reconcile the expense.
Cap what a card can spend, in products that issue cards.

Where the definition stops: the payment. The category is defined by expenses. Some products also read AI vendors' usage. Owners, contracts and unused seats vary by product.

Cloud cost tools

Gartner defines cloud financial management tools as tools that collect, organize, display, optimize and manage spend on cloud infrastructure and platform services. Source: Gartner, market definition of cloud financial management tools.

Products Gartner lists in this market include IBM Cloudability, VMware Aria Cost, Vantage and CloudBolt. Products are named as examples of the kind and are not graded here.

What they do well:

Allocate and report the AI you buy through your cloud.
Find anomalies, and optimize commitments on cloud capacity.

Where the definition stops: the cloud bill. The category is defined by cloud infrastructure and platform services. Some products also import AI vendors' bills. Owners and contracts vary by product.

AI gateways

Gartner defines an AI gateway as an intermediary between applications and AI services or models: a central point for security, governance and observability of AI workloads. Source: Gartner, market definition of AI gateways.

Products Gartner lists in this market include LiteLLM, Kong AI Gateway, TrueFoundry AI Platform and Gravitee. Products are named as examples of the kind and are not graded here.

What they do well:

Route, secure and observe the requests your own applications and agents send.
Track and cap spend by key, user or team, and stop a request as it is made.
Lower what a request costs, by caching or by routing to a cheaper model.

Where the definition stops: the traffic routed through it. An intermediary sees the requests sent through it. A seat is not traffic, and AI that connects straight to its vendor sits outside it unless you route it there.

Products are named as examples from Gartner's listings and are not graded here. Many products go past their category's definition. The gateways Asato reads and writes are LiteLLM and Azure API Management.

Row by row

The first column describes what tools of these kinds typically do, from the public definitions linked on this page. Individual products differ: "Varies by product" means some do and some do not, and "Not in the category" means the row is outside the definitions, not that no product does it.

What you are asking	An AI cost tool	Asato
See what AI costs	Yes, starting from what each one reads: the payments, the cloud bill, or the traffic routed through a gateway.	Yes. Each vendor's seats and metered usage are read into one total, and the month is closed against your invoices.
Seats, credits and tokens in one ledger	Varies by product.	Yes, for the vendors Asato reads. Each line says how its amount was obtained and how old the vendor's figures are. A source Asato cannot read is listed as a gap, never as zero.
Name an owner for each seat, key and agent	Varies by product. A gateway attributes its traffic to the keys, users and teams set up in it.	Yes. Asato proposes an owner from your directory and contracts, and asks that person to accept. Spend with no owner stays listed, with a reason.
Hold spend to a budget	Varies by product. A gateway can stop the next request, and a card limit can decline a charge.	Yes, where the vendor allows it. Once a named person approves, Asato writes the limit into the vendor's own control, or into a LiteLLM or Azure API Management gateway, and reads it back. How fast a limit acts depends on the vendor, from the next request to about two days. Elsewhere the owner gets an alert with the step to take.
Lower what one request costs	Yes, in an AI gateway, by caching or by routing to a cheaper model.	No. Asato does not route, cache or filter requests, so it does not make a request cheaper. It is never in the path of your AI traffic, and never collects prompts, responses or files.
Find unused software and idle hardware too	Not in the category.	Yes. One record across software, hardware, AI and contracts, so what nobody uses there can fund AI.
Who carries out a change	By kind: an approver of the expense, an administrator of the cloud account, or the gateway itself.	AI agents, once a person you name approves each fix, or sets a policy that governs fixes of that kind. Every step is logged.
How a saving is counted	Varies by product.	Found, Approved or Saved, as three separate figures. A Saved figure is agreed jointly by you and Asato.
What it takes to start	By kind: your payment records, your cloud billing data, or your applications pointed at the gateway.	Read-only admin access on two or three AI vendors, your directory, your contract rates and a budget owner for each team. Nothing to install.

Which to choose

Asato, unless one tool already sees your whole AI bill.

Choose Asato when:

You buy AI from more than one vendor, by the seat, the credit and the token.
Seats, keys and agents are spending with no named owner.
You want one budget policy across vendors, written into each vendor's own limits.
The same team has to find the savings that fund AI.

One tool is enough when:

All your AI traffic runs through one gateway, and it already attributes and caps that spend.
All your AI is bought through your cloud, and your cloud cost tool already allocates it.
Your finance tool already reads your AI vendors' usage, and that is all you need.

How to start beside the tools you run

Page heading: Start beside the tools you run. Your gateway, your cloud cost tool and your finance tools stay as they are.

Start read-only. Asato connects to two or three AI vendors, your directory and your contract rates, read-only by default. Nothing to install.
Compare what each shows. In one week you hold your Asset Clarity Report. Pick one AI seat and one API key, and ask each tool who owns both.
Add limits when you choose. Write access is added one vendor at a time. Where you run LiteLLM or Azure API Management, Asato writes budgets into it.

Fund AI from waste

Page heading: Fund AI from waste. What customers found in software, not in AI spend.

The results below are in software, not in AI spend. Asato has published no customer result on AI spend. The same record that holds the AI bill holds software, hardware and contracts, so what nobody uses there can fund AI. The figure marked Measured is software spend given an owner; it is not AI spend and not a saving. Found, Approved and Saved are the only three states of a saving, and are never added together. A figure marked Measured describes scope or evidence, not a saving.

Found: About 15% of productivity-suite spend at CDW sat with inactive or invalid accounts. Case study: https://www.asato.ai/case-study-cdw-saas-visibility
Measured: $100M+ a year of software spend at CDW attributed to a consuming unit, each dollar with a named owner. This figure is not a saving. Case study: https://www.asato.ai/case-study-cdw-technology-economics
Saved, as the customer reports it: Tens of thousands of dollars at Zymo Research, where manual license audits have stopped. Case study: https://www.asato.ai/case-study-zymo-research

How a customer starts

Section heading on the visual page: "Where to start." The line under it: "One business unit. Your Asset Clarity Report takes one week, with read-only access." The action is the button "Get your Asset Clarity Report". This page says nothing about what Asato charges.

To start, request a demo at https://www.asato.ai/talk-to-sales.

Questions

The page shows at most five questions, the ones that belong to it. Any others are kept here for agents.

Is Asato an AI gateway?

No. Asato does not route, cache or inspect AI requests. Where you run LiteLLM or Azure API Management, Asato reads usage counts and costs from its logs and writes budgets into it, and the gateway does the blocking. If Asato is down, every AI call still works.

We run a gateway. Why add Asato?

For what is not routed through it. A gateway attributes its traffic to the keys, users and teams set up in it. A seat is not traffic, and chat assistants, coding tools and the AI inside Microsoft 365 connect straight to their vendors unless you route them through it. Asato reads the gateway's logs beside each vendor's own records, and proposes an owner for each line from your directory and contracts.

Our finance tool already tracks AI spend. What does Asato add?

The person, the contract and the limit. A finance tool starts from the payment, and some now read AI vendors' usage as well. Asato ties each seat, key and agent to a person, a cost center and a contract from your own records, prices the seats nobody uses, and writes the limit into the vendor's own controls once a named person approves, where the vendor allows it.

Does our cloud cost tool cover this?

The cloud bill, and in some products more. A cloud cost tool manages spend on cloud infrastructure and platform services, so it sees the models you call through your cloud, and some products now import AI vendors' bills too. What varies is the rest: a named owner for each seat and key, the contract behind it, and a limit written back to the vendor. Asato does those from your own records.

Which vendors can Asato set a limit in?

It depends on the vendor. Asato writes limits to Claude Enterprise, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and AWS Budgets, and to LiteLLM and Azure API Management gateways. For OpenAI API projects, Anthropic API workspaces, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure OpenAI and Vertex AI, the owner gets an alert with the step to take, and Asato checks that it worked.

How is Asato built differently?

In three layers. Asato is built on an Asset Knowledge Graph that contextualizes and connects your records, a Data Intelligence Engine whose data products use rules, machine learning and language models to produce priced recommendations, and Agentic AI that carries out each fix with a human in the loop. An AI cost tool is built on one kind of record: expenses, a cloud bill, or the requests routed through a gateway.

Does Asato see our prompts or outputs?

No. Asato works on usage counts, costs, identities and contracts. It never collects prompts, responses or files.

Does Asato measure the return on AI spend?

No. Asato covers the cost side: the ledger, the owner, the budget and the limit, and it counts each saving as Found, Approved or Saved. It does not measure the business outcome of an AI workload.

What can Asato not see?

Personal accounts. AI accounts people pay for personally, and any source with no admin API and no billing line. Each source Asato cannot read is listed as a gap. Asato does not estimate spend it cannot read.

How does an organization start?

With one business unit. Asato needs read-only admin access on two or three AI vendors, the directory, the contract rates and a budget owner for each team. In one week you hold your Asset Clarity Report.

Who approves a change?

A person you name. Nothing changes until a named person approves it. A person you name approves each fix, or sets a policy that governs fixes of that kind. Each step is logged: who approved it, what changed, where and when.

Sources

Every outside fact on this page comes from a source that sells nothing in these categories.

Last updated: 2026-10-12

Layer	An AI cost tool	Asato
How your data is held	An AI cost toolBy kind: expense records, cloud billing data, or the requests that pass through the gateway.	AsatoThe Asset Knowledge Graph. It contextualizes and connects your records: each asset is linked to its owner, its contract and its cost, however many systems disagreed.
How an insight is produced	An AI cost toolBy kind: expense reports, cloud cost reports, some with statistical models or machine learning, or a gateway’s view of its traffic.	AsatoThe Data Intelligence Engine. Its data products use rules, machine learning and language models to turn the graph into recommendations, each with a price and an owner.
How a change is made	An AI cost toolBy kind: an approval on an expense, a change in the cloud account, or a block at the gateway.	AsatoAgentic AI, with a human in the loop. Agents carry out each fix once a person you name approves it, log who, what, when and why, and keep watching for new waste.

What you are asking	An AI cost tool	Asato
See what AI costs	An AI cost toolYes, starting from what each one reads: the payments, the cloud bill, or the traffic routed through a gateway.	AsatoYes. Each vendor’s seats and metered usage are read into one total, and the month is closed against your invoices.
Seats, credits and tokens in one ledger	An AI cost toolVaries by product.	AsatoYes, for the vendors Asato reads. Each line says how its amount was obtained and how old the vendor’s figures are. A source Asato cannot read is listed as a gap, never as zero.
Name an owner for each seat, key and agent	An AI cost toolVaries by product. A gateway attributes its traffic to the keys, users and teams set up in it.	AsatoYes. Asato proposes an owner from your directory and contracts, and asks that person to accept. Spend with no owner stays listed, with a reason.
Hold spend to a budget	An AI cost toolVaries by product. A gateway can stop the next request, and a card limit can decline a charge.	AsatoYes, where the vendor allows it. Once a named person approves, Asato writes the limit into the vendor’s own control, or into a LiteLLM or Azure API Management gateway, and reads it back. How fast a limit acts depends on the vendor, from the next request to about two days. Elsewhere the owner gets an alert with the step to take.
Lower what one request costs	An AI cost toolYes, in an AI gateway, by caching or by routing to a cheaper model.	AsatoNo. Asato does not route, cache or filter requests, so it does not make a request cheaper. It is never in the path of your AI traffic, and never collects prompts, responses or files.
Find unused software and idle hardware too	An AI cost toolNot in the category.	AsatoYes. One record across software, hardware, AI and contracts, so what nobody uses there can fund AI.
Who carries out a change	An AI cost toolBy kind: an approver of the expense, an administrator of the cloud account, or the gateway itself.	AsatoAI agents, once a person you name approves each fix, or sets a policy that governs fixes of that kind. Every step is logged.
How a saving is counted	An AI cost toolVaries by product.	AsatoFound, Approved or Saved, as three separate figures. A Saved figure is agreed jointly by you and Asato.
What it takes to start	An AI cost toolBy kind: your payment records, your cloud billing data, or your applications pointed at the gateway.	AsatoRead-only admin access on two or three AI vendors, your directory, your contract rates and a budget owner for each team. Nothing to install.

Asato vs AI cost management tools

The short answer

The difference

How each is built