Burn rate

Last verified

Burn rate is spend per unit time. For AI APIs the useful granularity is daily, because a monthly figure hides a bad Tuesday until it is a bad month.

Knowing a normal day makes several things possible at once: an anomaly threshold with a sensible value, a forecast for the month, and a sanity check on any change you ship.

If you cannot say roughly what a normal day costs, you have no baseline to detect anything against.