Concepts

The two-halves mental model: Monetization and Internal spend on one ledger.

Tanso is one ledger fed from two directions. A customer’s usage event and a vendor’s admin API both land on the same store, so the numbers on both sides of your AI business come from the same source instead of two spreadsheets that never quite agree.

Monetization — the AI you sell

A customer’s usage event carries what it cost you to serve, next to what you billed for it. Metering, entitlements, credits, subscriptions and Stripe billing all read and write the same ledger, so margin per customer, per feature and per model falls out of it rather than requiring a separate report. Start at Introduction and Quickstart.

Internal spend — the AI you buy

Usage and cost are pulled from the vendors’ own admin APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, LiteLLM) on a schedule — no proxy in the request path, no agent on anyone’s laptop. It’s reconciled against the invoice, allocated to teams and projects, budgeted, and joined to what it produced. Start at Internal AI spend.

Where they meet

Feature P&L links a project on the Internal spend side to the feature it shipped on the Monetization side, and reports that feature’s revenue and serving cost next to what it cost to build — net margin, in one number. Nobody else can draw that table because nobody else has both halves on one engine.

Either half runs on its own

Neither side depends on the other being configured. Set APP_MODULES_MONETIZATION_ENABLED=false for an internal-spend-only install, or APP_MODULES_BUILD_ENABLED=false to run monetization alone — the other half’s routes disappear (404 module_disabled) and its console section hides. See Self-hosting for the full flag list.