Concepts
Billing reconciliation
Compare SDK-estimated AI costs against provider-billed invoices.
Reconciliation compares two different signals:
| Signal | Source | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Estimated SDK cost | Wrapped SDK / ingest events | Catalog-priced estimate for attribution and alerting |
| Provider-billed cost | Connected provider billing APIs | What you were charged |
They will not always match. Common reasons:
- Catalog lag versus provider price changes
- Credits, commitments, quota coverage, or free tiers
- Different timezones or settlement lag on invoices
- Incomplete SDK coverage (unwrapped paths, batch jobs not tracked yet)
- Gateway markup or BYOK upstream pricing differences
How to use it
- Instrument SDKs so attribution is complete for the traffic you care about.
- Connect provider accounts so SuperPenguin can pull billed usage and cost.
- Compare estimate vs billed by provider, model, and day in the dashboard.
- Investigate gaps: missing wraps, batch helpers not called, or expected billing adjustments.
Provider-facing billing exports (for vendors implementing the FOCUS AI Provider Profile) must return provider-reported BilledCost, not a public-rate estimate. See Cost data.