Keld Atlas separates spend, meaning what you actually pay, from usage, meaning how much you use. Under a subscription the two diverge, because using a flat seat more does not change the invoice, so Keld Atlas reports them as distinct numbers rather than blending them. This page defines the cost terms you will see, explains how Keld Atlas divides a subscription across the work it paid for, and lists which figures use which cost basis.
Keld Atlas also defines these terms in the product. Click How Spend Is Calculated in the Observability page header, or Understand the numbers on a spend chart, to read them in context.
The cost terms
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Consumption Cost | Real pay-as-you-go cost: the actual per-token spend for members on a usage-based plan, reconciled to the provider's billed total where Keld Atlas has it. For a member on a flat plan this is zero, because their cost is the seat rather than the tokens. |
| Seat Cost | The flat subscription fee for a member's seat, prorated to the window you are viewing. It is sunk whether the seat is used heavily, lightly, or not at all. |
| Allocated Subscription Cost | The share of a member's monthly seat that a given piece of work carries. |
| Real Cost | Consumption Cost plus Allocated Subscription Cost: the all-in cost of a slice of work. Notional is never folded in. |
| Idle seat | Seat fees for days on which a member held a paid seat but ran nothing at all. Real money with no work behind it. |
| Unmapped | Allocated seat spend that Keld Atlas could not tie to a specific value, either usage with no priceable tokens to weight by, or work falling outside the breakdown you are viewing. |
| Notional | For a member on a subscription, or whose plan is unknown, what their usage would have cost on a usage-based plan: tokens multiplied by list price. Context only, never billed and never counted as real spend. |
How your plan decides what counts
Keld Atlas resolves cost per member and per provider, from the plan a Keld administrator assigns:
- Usage-based: the member's per-token telemetry cost counts, reconciled to the provider's billed total where Keld Atlas has it.
- Flat plan: the member's cost is the seat fee. Per-token telemetry is not added on top, because that would double-count the same work.
A member with no assigned plan defaults to flat, so usage cost surfaces only on positive evidence of a usage-based plan. This is why unassigned members and unattributed usage appear as Notional: Keld Atlas does not know what they actually pay. Assigning plans on the Teams page replaces those Notional figures with real cost.
How Keld Atlas allocates subscription cost
A flat seat costs the same whether someone runs one prompt or a thousand. To report cost by team, cost center, or any other breakdown, Keld Atlas divides each subscription across the work it paid for.
Allocation settles one day at a time:
- Each day carries that seat's daily share of its monthly price, calculated as the monthly price divided by 30.
- At the close of each day, that share is split across the values you are breaking down by, weighted by the list-price value of the tokens rather than by the number of requests. An hour on a frontier model therefore outweighs an hour on a small one.
- Once a day closes, its split is final and is never recalculated.
Two properties follow, and both matter when you report against these figures:
- An allocated figure only grows.
- The parts always sum to exactly the subscription cost accrued so far.
Every day's accrual has to land somewhere. A day with priceable usage splits across your breakdown. A day with no usage at all goes to Idle seat. A day with usage but nothing priceable to weight by goes to Unmapped. Holding Idle seat separately keeps an unused seat visible instead of letting it inflate the cost of unrelated work.
Which figures name a specific cost type
Unless a figure names a cost type, it reports Real Cost for the period shown. Breakdowns in Observability work this way, including CapEx / OpEx.
Some figures deliberately isolate one component:
| Figure | Cost basis | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Consumption Cost card in Observability, and the Consumption Cost column in Team members | Consumption Cost only | Shows metered usage on its own, separate from any seat fee |
| Seat Cost card in Observability, and the Seat Cost column in Team members | Seat Cost | Shows the full prorated price of the seats, not a usage-weighted share of them |
| Spend over time · usage + flat seats, on the Spend page | Both, as two series | The usage series is Consumption Cost; the flat-seats series is Allocated Subscription Cost |
| Subscription efficiency, on the Team tab of Observability | Notional, against Seat Cost | Compares what a seat holder's usage would have cost with what their seat costs. Utilization is Notional divided by Seat Cost, and seats below 50% are flagged as candidates to downgrade |
| The recommended action about paid seats going unused | Seat Cost | The action counts the full price of seats that saw no usage in the window |
| Idle seat and Unmapped beside the CapEx / OpEx strip | Allocated Subscription Cost | Neither can be classified as capitalizable or operational, so both sit outside the split and are shown as context next to it |
Where to find these figures
The Consumption Cost and Seat Cost cards, and the CapEx / OpEx breakdown, are on the Financial tab of Observability. Subscription efficiency and the Team members table are on the Team tab. Spend over time · usage + flat seats is on the Spend page, which you reach from the linked cards on the Briefing. Seat plans are assigned on the Teams page. For the rules behind the CapEx and OpEx split, see Capex / Opex rules.