How to Monitor Costs Across Multiple AI Providers in One Dashboard

The multi-provider reality

Most teams that use AI APIs don't stick with one provider. They use OpenAI for chat, Anthropic for coding tasks, Google for multimodal work, and maybe DeepSeek or Groq for cost-effective inference. Each provider has its own dashboard, its own billing cycle, and its own way of reporting usage.

Managing costs across 3–5 providers means logging into multiple dashboards, exporting CSVs, and trying to piece together a complete picture in a spreadsheet. It's slow, error-prone, and means you only review costs when you remember to — which is usually after something has already gone wrong.

Why a unified dashboard matters

A single dashboard that aggregates costs from all your providers gives you three things that separate dashboards can't:

• Total spend visibility — See your entire AI API bill in one number, broken down by provider, model, and time period.
• Cross-provider comparison — Compare cost-per-task between providers to make informed routing decisions.
• Unified alerting — One set of budget alerts that covers all providers, instead of configuring alerts separately in each dashboard.

What to track across providers

When monitoring multiple providers, focus on these metrics:

• Daily spend by provider — Spot which provider is driving the most cost and whether that's proportional to the value it delivers.
• Cost per model — Within each provider, identify which models are consuming the most budget. Often one model accounts for 70%+ of a provider's spend.
• Spend trends — Are costs growing linearly with usage, or are there unexpected jumps? Week-over-week comparison is the fastest way to spot anomalies.
• Provider share — Track what percentage of your total spend goes to each provider. Use this to evaluate whether routing optimizations are shifting spend as expected.

Setting up multi-provider monitoring

MeterFox connects to 15+ providers through a combination of direct API sync and proxy-based tracking:

• OpenAI and Anthropic sync automatically via their Admin APIs
• OpenRouter syncs via their Activity API
• All other providers (Google, Mistral, DeepSeek, Groq, etc.) track through the proxy gateway

Each provider takes about 2 minutes to connect. Once connected, data flows into a single dashboard where you can filter by provider, model, or date range.

Making routing decisions with real data

The biggest benefit of multi-provider monitoring is informed routing. When you can see that Claude Sonnet costs $3/1M tokens for coding tasks while DeepSeek V3 achieves similar quality at $0.27/1M tokens, you can make a data-driven decision to shift workloads.

Without unified data, these decisions are based on gut feel and published pricing. With real usage data, you can compare actual cost per task and make routing changes that measurably reduce spend.

Key takeaways

If you're using more than one AI provider, separate dashboards are costing you both time and money. Consolidate into a single view, set up unified alerts, and use the data to optimize your provider mix based on real cost-per-task metrics.