How savings are measured

Every request through ACOG is recorded with two prices.

	Meaning
Actual cost	What the request cost through ACOG: the tokens your provider billed, at that provider’s price for the model that answered. Zero for a request answered from a cache.
Would have cost direct	What the same request would have cost sent straight to the provider and model you asked for, with no ACOG optimizations, at the provider’s published list price.

The saving is the difference, counted per request and never below zero for a request. Totals add up the per-request savings, which is why a total saving can be larger than “would have cost” minus “actual” over the same period.

Where the numbers come from

• Token counts are the ones your provider reports in each response, including cached-input and cache-write tokens.
• Prices come from ACOG’s price book of the providers’ published list prices, which follows the providers’ price changes. Each recorded price notes its source.
• Your own discounts with a provider are not known to ACOG, so both prices are list prices. The saving is therefore the saving at list price.

How each mechanism is counted

Disposition	Actual cost	Would have cost direct
Exact cache, Semantic cache, Dedup	Zero: no provider call	The recorded usage of the answer that was reused, priced at the model you asked for
Optimized (prompt caching, cleanup)	The billed tokens, including the cheaper cached-input tokens	The same request without ACOG’s cache markers and cleanup
Batch	The batch-tier price	The synchronous price for the same request, including your own prompt-cache discounts
Auto mode	The model that answered	Your default model, for the same request. The saving is never more than the default model would have cost.
Pass-through	The billed tokens	The same: no saving

ACOG’s own calls on your connections (the auto mode judge, batch tier probes and cache refresh pings) are recorded as separate rows named acog-internal-judge, acog-batch-probe and acog-cache-refresh, so their cost is visible.

Checking the numbers

A request answered from cache never reached your provider, so it is absent from your provider invoice. That absence is the saving, and it can be checked.

Reports → Export → Savings proof downloads a per-request reconciliation (CSV, Excel or JSON) with each request’s tokens, prices, price sources and saving, which you can match against your provider invoices. The How we measure savings link on the Reports export menu explains each column.

What you pay

On the hosted service you pay a share of the measured saving, invoiced monthly; requests that save nothing cost nothing extra. See Billing and the pricing page.

Where to see it

Place	What it shows
Overview	Spend, savings and what you would have spent directly, over a window you choose
Reports	Usage and savings by user, model, provider, API key or label; recent requests with each one’s cost and saving; an executive summary
Activity	Each request with the model asked for, the model that answered, tokens used and avoided, and its cost (requires the Activity permission)
Management API	GET /v1/orgs/{org}/dashboard/summary and related endpoints. See Management API.