Questions
Direct answers, including the ones that are a no.
What Metergrade is, what it costs, what happens to your telemetry, and what it does not support yet.
What it is
- What is Metergrade?
- Metergrade is the economic control plane for AI. It meters what every AI workload costs, grades proposed changes against your own quality thresholds, and turns the changes that pass into deployable Azure configuration. It is built for organizations running AI traffic through Azure API Management.
- How is Metergrade different from an AI cost dashboard?
- A dashboard reports a number and leaves the decision with you. Metergrade returns a verdict: each proposed change is tested against your own quality, latency and reliability requirements and comes back PASS, FAIL or INCONCLUSIVE. If the evidence is not sufficient to decide, Metergrade says INCONCLUSIVE rather than rounding up to a recommendation.
- What does Metergrade actually produce?
- Deployable cloud configuration — APIM policy, Bicep and Terraform — plus the evidence behind it. Changes ship through your existing pipeline and your existing approvals. Metergrade produces the artifact; your controls remain the gate.
- What are the five capabilities?
- Observe establishes what the estate costs at workload level. Analyze identifies inefficient configurations, each tied to a measured delta. Validate tests a candidate change and returns a verdict. Deploy emits the validated change as cloud-native configuration. Govern continuously measures cost, quality, drift and policy compliance after deployment.
Your data
- Does Metergrade see my telemetry?
- Not during the Economic Control Check. The check runs inside your own Azure environment, requires no account, and has no upload step — there is no path for your telemetry to take. Saving a baseline is a separate mode that requires you to send a supported evidence export, and that transfer is reviewed before it happens.
- Does Metergrade need my prompts or model responses?
- No. Prompt bodies and model response bodies are not required. Metergrade prices and grades an estate from token counts and metadata — model and deployment identifiers, timestamps, latency, status, and the workload identifiers that attribute spend to an owner.
- What happens if a prohibited field ends up in an export?
- The export is refused or quarantined. Metergrade does not silently strip prohibited fields and continue, because a silent strip leaves you believing something was never sent when it was.
- Where is a saved baseline stored, and how long is it kept?
- Metergrade has not published those answers yet. They will appear on the transfer review page before any upload is possible, and stating them approximately in the meantime would be worse than stating nothing.
- Does Metergrade sit in my request path?
- No. Applications keep calling Azure API Management, and APIM keeps routing to Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry and your other endpoints. Metergrade adds no hop, no proxy and no new gateway. It extends Azure API Management and never replaces it.
- What do I have to install?
- Nothing. The Metergrade Setup Kit is plain text, KQL and a workbook definition — no installer, no daemon, no agent runtime, no credential, and no outbound call to Metergrade. It is versioned and carries a content digest you can verify before you run it.
Support and scope
- Does Metergrade support AWS or Google Cloud?
- No. Azure API Management is the only supported environment today, and Metergrade makes no commitment about when others will follow. Metergrade is validating the product and pricing model with Azure customers first; additional cloud environments will follow based on customer demand.
- Is Metergrade affiliated with Microsoft?
- No. Metergrade is an independent company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a partner of Microsoft. Azure and other Microsoft product names appear on this site as factual references to the platform Metergrade runs on.
- Who is Metergrade for?
- Platform engineering, FinOps and AI platform teams running production AI traffic through Azure API Management, in organizations where a cheaper configuration is not a deliverable until someone can prove it still meets the standard.
Pricing and buying
- What does Metergrade cost?
- Free is $0. Team is US$199/month and Foundation is US$999/month. Enterprise starts at US$60,000/year and Regulated is custom. Separately from the plans, an Assisted Assessment is a US$5,000 fixed engagement and a Proof Engagement is US$20,000–35,000.
- Can I buy Team today?
- Not yet. Team and Foundation are priced but not yet available to buy — self-service checkout does not exist. Free is available now, and Enterprise and Regulated are sold directly. When Team can be bought, the price shown on the pricing page is the price you will pay.
- What is free, and what is the catch?
- The Economic Control Check and Metergrade Free are both genuinely free, and Free is a retained product rather than a trial. The paid boundary sits at Validate: discovering the economic state of your estate costs nothing, and payment begins when Metergrade starts making evidence-backed decisions about changing it.
- How is Metergrade priced — per seat, per token, or per request?
- None of those. Metergrade is not priced per seat, per token, per request, or as a percentage of savings. Seats are not the billing unit, because the product works better when finance, FinOps, engineering, security and approvers are all in the room.
- What is an Assisted Assessment?
- A US$5,000 fixed engagement in which Metergrade works with your team to establish and interpret the baseline, identify the workloads worth acting on first, and return an executive-ready evidence package. Metergrade Free already produces a saved baseline and evidence-backed findings at no cost; the engagement adds the people and the interpretation.
Working with Metergrade
- Can a delivery partner run this for us?
- Yes. Metergrade supports partner-led delivery, and if your organization is already working with a Metergrade delivery partner, an assessment can be scoped and delivered through that engagement rather than sold to you directly.
- Do the numbers on this site come from real customers?
- No. The economic figures shown across this site are illustrative examples used to explain the mechanism. Metergrade has no published customer result, and does not present one as though it had.
- How do I start?
- Run the Economic Control Check. It needs no account, runs in your own Azure environment, and sends Metergrade nothing — so it answers whether you have an economic problem worth acting on before you decide anything about Metergrade.
Still deciding?
The Economic Control Check answers the only question that matters first: whether your estate has an economic problem worth acting on. It runs in your own environment and sends Metergrade nothing.
Anything not answered here: hello@metergrade.com