Frequently Asked Questions

FinOps tools track cloud infrastructure spend at the resource level (VMs, storage, GPU hours). Bear Lumen goes further: we reconcile AI costs with revenue data, produce margin reports by customer and feature, and tell you when pricing needs to change. A FinOps tool shows your total OpenAI spend. We tell you that Customer X on Feature Y is underwater, and recommend what to adjust.

Billing tools handle the transaction. Bear Lumen handles the pricing ops work that billing tools don't do: reconciling provider costs with revenue, producing margin reports, monitoring for cost shifts, and recommending pricing changes. Keep your billing system. We plug into it and do the analysis.

Teams that need AI pricing ops handled. If you build AI products, we produce margin reports by customer and feature, flag underwater accounts, and recommend pricing changes. If you use AI internally, we produce per-team cost reports, enforce budgets, and alert finance before spend exceeds thresholds.

Nobody is doing your AI pricing ops. Provider invoices land, spreadsheets get updated quarterly (if at all), and by the time the analysis is done the window to act has closed. Bear Lumen does that work: reconciles costs with revenue, delivers pricing decisions before the provider bill lands, and gives you the auditability to understand every recommendation.

Spreadsheets work until they don't. Manually reconciling provider invoices, Stripe data, and usage logs takes days per month, can't alert you when something changes, and makes scenario modeling painful. Bear Lumen does that reconciliation continuously. You get the report, not the spreadsheet.

No. Cost tracking works from day one with no customers or billing required. When revenue flows, the same data powers margin analysis and pricing validation.

The SDK captures request metadata (customer ID, feature, model) alongside cost data. We aggregate provider costs and attribute them to individual requests, then produce margin reports by customer, feature, and model.

No. Bear Lumen plugs into your existing billing system (Stripe, Orb, etc.) to get the revenue side. We connect that with provider cost data and handle the margin analysis, reporting, and recommendations. Nothing changes about how you invoice.

Flat rate, volume pricing, tiered/graduated pricing, and hybrid (base fee + usage). The pricing scenario modeling lets you model any combination against historical usage data.

Adding the SDK to your codebase takes minutes. Full setup (connecting revenue sources, defining dimensions) depends on your stack. First pricing decisions typically arrive within the first week. Early customers get direct onboarding support.

Yes. The platform includes demo data so you can see how cost attribution, margin analysis, and pricing recommendations work before connecting your own providers and revenue sources.

We collect request metadata and cost data. All data is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3) and at rest (AES-256). No raw prompts or customer PII. You own your data and can export or delete it anytime. Building toward SOC 2 Type II certification.

Bear Lumen offers a free Starter plan with 100K events per month. Growth ($49/mo) includes 500K events with Summary AI. Scale ($500/mo) includes unlimited events and full AI access. No credit card required to start. Events beyond your limit cost $1 per 25,000. Enterprise pricing is custom.

The system works at any scale. Smaller customer bases mean faster integration and clearer data. Many teams find it easier to establish cost tracking early.