AI Chargeback
AI chargeback allocates AI and LLM costs back to the teams, departments, or cost centers that incurred them.
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AI chargeback is the FinOps practice of billing internal teams for the AI they actually consume, so cost sits with the owner who can influence it rather than in a central budget nobody controls. Its lighter cousin, showback, reports the same allocation without moving money — a common first step before formal chargeback.
Chargeback only works if the underlying attribution is trustworthy. Behest records model, tokens, and cost per request against the team and cost center that triggered it, so the numbers you charge back are the numbers your provider billed — not an estimate reverse-engineered from a spreadsheet.
BYOK makes it cleaner
With Bring Your Own Key (BYOAK), each department can route through its own provider account, so the actual invoice from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google flows directly to that department. That gives you perfect billing isolation and removes the need for complex internal reconciliation — the provider does the chargeback for you, and Behest supplies the attribution and governance on top.
Frequently asked questions
How does BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) enable clean chargebacks?
Behest's BYOAK v2 (Bring Your Own API Key) allows you to securely store provider keys per tenant or department. When a department makes an LLM request, it routes through their specific provider account. This means the actual LLM invoice from OpenAI or Google goes directly to that department, providing perfect billing isolation and eliminating the need for complex internal chargeback accounting.