The financial layer of AI.
Optimization is a commodity.Proof is the product.
Anyone can route a prompt to a cheaper model. The hard thing, the thing worth building a company on, is proving what every dollar of AI spend bought, in a way nobody has to take on faith.
Recovea is an AI-spend gateway: one neutral, BYO-key endpoint in the request path that lets a team see, control, and prove every dollar their AI spends. That is the whole wedge, and we stay in it. This page is the why.
Real money, no financial layer
AI became a real line item faster than anyone built the infrastructure to manage it. Teams route serious budgets through model APIs and find out what happened at month end, in a bill that answers none of the questions that matter: which team, which feature, which request, and was it worth it. Every other kind of corporate spend has a financial layer: controls, attribution, an audit trail. AI spend mostly has a dashboard and a hope.
The optimizer can't be the referee
The market's first answer was optimization: routers, caches, compressors, each promising a percentage off the bill. Some of them work. All of them share a flaw no engineering can fix: the party selling the optimization also reports the savings. A number produced by the company paid on that number isn't evidence. It's marketing. Optimization is a commodity; anyone can ship a router. A referee is not.
The seat we took
So we took the other seat. Recovea sits in the request path (one base_url change, your own keys) and does the unglamorous financial work: meter every request, enforce every budget, and write a receipt for every dollar into a hash-chained ledger you can re-derive offline. When a cache optimization is applied, its effect reconciles to the provider's own reported numbers. Every savings figure states its basis and reads measured, never verified. Whatever the optimization market does next, the ledger is the part that compounds.
Three legs, one wedge
Products, services, and a research program. We declared the shape as a vision on day one, and we earn it in phases. Nothing appears on this site before the thing behind it is real.
The platform
The meter, the breaker, the ledger: spend infrastructure in the request path, live today.
Done for you
The AI Spend Assessment: a fixed-fee, fixed-scope teardown of every dollar your AI spends, delivered board-ready.
The program
The open methodology behind every number we publish, and the open problem the program exists to solve: automated, provable evaluation.
The referee that takes no money from the players.
Neutrality here isn't a value statement. It's the license to operate. It has to be structural, visible in how the money flows, or it's just a claim.
Your keys, your accounts
You hold the provider relationship; we never resell tokens. And the gateway is designed to fail open: if we degrade, your traffic goes straight to the provider, everywhere except the cap you armed.
A flat fee, not a toll
We charge a flat platform subscription with published usage bands, never a per-token markup and never a percentage of your spend. Crossing a band is a billing step, never an outage.
No one pays for the verdict
No placement fees, no referral deals, no routing kickbacks. The subject of the proof never pays for the verdict.
Where we actually are
We're a small team with a live product, open for signups. The gateway does what this page says it does: it sees spend, enforces caps, and writes receipts, today, in production.
What we don't do yet is charge for savings. Gain-share stays off until our evaluation gate is calibrated on real traffic and a savings number can survive someone checking it. Until then, every savings figure we show reads measured, never verified, and we don't bill a cent against it.
We'd rather grow slowly on numbers that hold than quickly on numbers that don't. If that's the kind of company you want in your request path, we'd like to meet you.
the founder, Recovea