Token Cost Attribution

Token Cost Attribution is the practice of metering model spend at the workflow level, not the account level, so every AI-backed deliverable carries its own cost line before it reaches a client retainer. The category description frames AI Infrastructure around cost, latency, and reliability, and cost is the variable agencies control least once a build ships. Forrester's Tokenomics analysis warns that agentic workflows billed by token consumption can erode margin when nobody audits them at design stage, and prompt-level trimming has been shown to cut per-task costs by 50 percent or more. A concrete case: an agency running document-summarization agents for three retainer clients discovers that one client's full-document attachments account for most of the monthly model bill, because no per-workflow meter existed. Gateways such as Helicone and Portkey log spend per request, which turns that discovery into a routing decision rather than a quarterly surprise.