Developer-centric gateways have introduced vital capabilities—but they stop at observability. For a CFO or auditor, a dashboard of token counts is far less useful than Finault's report explaining that $50K of GPT-4 spend went to the Support team's pilot.
| Feature | Finault | Portkey | Helicone | CloudZero | Spreadsheets |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primary Buyer | Finance / CFO | Engineering | Engineering | FinOps | Anyone |
| GL-Ready Journal Entries | ✓ Built-in | ✗ | ✗ | ⚠ Manual | ⚠ DIY |
| NetSuite / QuickBooks Export | ✓ Native | ✗ | ✗ | ⚠ Custom | ✗ |
| Reconciliation Certificate | ✓ SHA-256 | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Cost Center Allocation | ✓ Automatic | ⚠ Tags only | ⚠ Tags only | ✓ | ⚠ Manual |
| Multi-Provider Support | ✓ 4 providers | ✓ Many | ✓ Many | ✓ Cloud | ⚠ Manual |
| Real-Time Gateway/Proxy | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Budget Enforcement | ✓ Hard caps | ✓ | ⚠ Alerts | ⚠ Alerts | ✗ |
| Unit Economics | ✓ In reports | ⚠ Dashboard | ⚠ Dashboard | ✓ | ⚠ DIY |
| Time to First Value | 60 seconds | 1-2 hours | 30 minutes | Days-weeks | Hours |
| Implementation Required | None (upload CSV) | Code changes | Code changes | Integration | None |
| Starting Price | Free | Free / $49+ | Free / $20+ | $$$ | Free |
Portkey is a powerful AI gateway built for engineering teams. It excels at routing, caching, and observability. But when month-end comes, your CFO can't use a Portkey dashboard to close the books.
Helicone offers beautiful dashboards and great developer UX. Engineers love it. But it doesn't produce the documents your controller needs to post journal entries or satisfy auditors.
Spreadsheets work... until they don't. Manual reconciliation takes 4+ hours every month, formulas break, and there's no audit trail. One wrong VLOOKUP and your numbers are wrong.
CloudZero is an enterprise FinOps platform with deep cloud cost management features. Great for infrastructure costs, but it wasn't built specifically for AI API spend with token-based billing.