Introducing Hebno: better AI spend control for teams
4 minutes read
Growing teams adopt AI faster than they can track it. Here is why we built Hebno, who it is for, and how we make money.
Most companies did not decide to spend a lot on AI. It happened to them.
One person expensed ChatGPT. Another put Claude on a personal card. A third signed up for a writing tool, a research tool, and two more nobody remembers. Twelve months later the finance lead is staring at a column of small charges that add up to a number no one can explain, tied to no team, and pointed at no client.
We built Hebno for the person who has to own that number.
The problem we kept seeing
Talk to any operator at a growing agency or consultancy and the same three problems come up.
Spend nobody can see. AI charges land on personal cards and expense reports. Nobody owns the total, so nobody can manage it. By the time it shows up in a monthly review, the money is already gone.
Costs that compound quietly. The strongest models cost many times more than the efficient ones. Used without a limit, that difference does not stay small. It grows every week until someone notices, and by then the bill has run well past what anyone planned.
Data nobody can account for. People paste client work into whatever tool is open. For a firm that handles other people's data, one leak can end a client relationship, and sometimes the company with it.
The tools built to fix this were made for the Fortune 500, or for engineers. Not for the operator who actually owns the budget and has no IT department to call.
What Hebno does
Hebno puts every major AI model behind one interface you can control. Your team gets the models they need. You get the visibility and the limits that come with running a real budget.
| The job | What you get |
|---|---|
| Access the right model | Every major provider in one place, assigned by team or role |
| See what AI actually costs | Live spend by team, by person, and by client project |
| Hold a budget | Hard limits that stop at the number you set, not soft alerts |
| Bill it back | Every euro tagged to the client it was spent on |
| Keep data accountable | EU processing, no training on your data, full audit logs |
The difference that matters most is the third row. Most tools alert you after you have overspent. Hebno stops at the limit. A budget that only warns you is not a budget.
Who Hebno is for
Hebno is for growing teams, not enterprises and not solo users. Think agencies, consultancies, and professional services firms of roughly 30 to 250 people.
The person who gets the most from it is usually the CEO, COO, or head of operations. They are not developers. They do not care about model benchmarks. They care about three things: what AI costs, which client it should be billed to, and whether the data is handled properly.
If that is you, the rest of this blog is written for you. Two good places to start:
- How to budget AI usage across teams without surprises
- AI spend control for agencies: a practical playbook
The part we care most about
Here is how we make money, stated plainly: Hebno charges for seats, not tokens. Your AI usage passes through at cost, with no markup.
That means we earn more when your spend goes down, not up. A tool sold to cut AI costs should never quietly profit when they rise. We would rather be honest about that from the first day than bet against the people we serve. You can read the full breakdown on our pricing page.
Where we are, honestly
We are early, and we will say so plainly. We are building Hebno with a small group of partners who feel this problem now, and shaping the product around what actually helps them.
If AI spend has become a number you cannot explain, we would like to hear from you.
