Honest comparison · Updated quarterly

Tokmeter vs Cloudflare AI Gateway.

Cloudflare AI Gateway is genuinely good and genuinely free. If you only need a fast caching proxy in front of a couple of providers, use it. Here's where Tokmeter is the better call.

tokmeter.ai
AI FinOps platform

For the procurement, finance, and CTO conversation. Install in 5 minutes without touching app code.

  • Read-only billing-key ingest — no proxy required
  • Chargeback reports, GL codes, budget approvals
  • IDE seats (Cursor, Copilot) alongside API spend
  • Anonymous benchmarks across hundreds of teams
Cloudflare AI Gateway
Free caching proxy

A fast edge proxy with caching, rate limits, and logs — great if you're already on Workers and your finance team isn't asking questions yet.

  • You become the gateway — every call routes through it
  • Request-count limits, not dollar caps
  • Engineering-team dashboards, not finance-grade
  • Cloudflare-wide compliance posture
Pick Cloudflare AI Gateway if…
  • · You're already a Workers shop and want one vendor for edge + AI.
  • · You need caching and rate limits, not budgets or chargebacks.
  • · Finance hasn't asked for an AI-spend report yet.
  • · You're fine being the proxy on the request hot path.
Pick Tokmeter if…
  • · Finance or procurement is asking "what is this AI bill?"
  • · You want to start in 5 minutes without an engineer.
  • · You need IDE-tool seats (Cursor, Copilot) in the same view as API spend.
  • · You want chargeback reports your CFO will actually accept.

Feature-by-feature

Updated June 2026. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.

Coverage
CapabilityTokmeterCloudflare AI Gateway
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini
Gateway proxy + billing ingest
via proxy only
Azure OpenAI, Vertex, AWS Bedrock
Billing-API ingest only — no gateway proxy
observe spend, don't route
via proxy
OpenAI-compatible providers (Groq, Together, Mistral, DeepSeek…)
OpenAI-compatible base URL
IDE seats (Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf)
Read-only admin/billing API ingest
Cursor + Copilot Q3
Manual CSV upload for non-API spend
Install without engineers
CapabilityTokmeterCloudflare AI Gateway
Read-only billing-key ingest (no code change)
5-minute setup
requires proxy code path
Works behind existing app gateway
you become the gateway
Rollback in one env var
FinOps & procurement
CapabilityTokmeterCloudflare AI Gateway
Chargeback report (PDF/CSV by team, cost center, GL code)
Budget approvals with email sign-off
Hard $ caps per org / team / virtual key
request count, not $
Per-feature spend tags (x-tokmeter-workflow)
custom metadata
Anonymized industry benchmarks (Spend Index)
Governance & evidence
CapabilityTokmeterCloudflare AI Gateway
BYOK with AES-256-GCM, per-org HKDF
Workers Secrets
Exportable audit log for security review
30 days log limit
PII/secret redaction guardrails
Per-request audit log retention
configurable
30 days log limit
Observability that finance reads
CapabilityTokmeterCloudflare AI Gateway
Dashboard for CFO / FinOps (not just engineers)
Single-request trace view
Ships to Datadog / Snowflake / OpenTelemetry
Logpush only
Slack / email digests for spend & security
Pricing
CapabilityTokmeterCloudflare AI Gateway
Free tier
Pay only when you cap or govern
Workers usage
Self-serve credit card
Available Partial / on roadmap Not available

Already on Cloudflare AI Gateway?

Keep it. You don't need to rip it out. Tokmeter ingests your provider billing read-only and sits alongside — so you get FinOps without changing your request path. Migrate the gateway later if you want.

Start free — 5 minSee coverageTalk to us
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