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Know what AI costs. See what you get back.

Understand spending, share budgets and connect AI use to the work it supports.

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Buy tokens, rent GPUs, or own the rack?

Open-weight models are now good enough to make self-hosting a financial question rather than a capability one. I modelled four options, an office rack, colocation, rented GPUs and per-token APIs, to find where each one actually wins. The answer turns on utilisation, and it isn't the one the internet keeps giving.

Turn a $3m AI bill into $1.9m

Most teams overpay for AI twice without noticing: they run everything through the default flagship model, and they buy the tokens on a metered plan they can't see into. An intelligent proxy fixes both. Here is the maths, a calculator you can drag, and where Flowstate fits.

Start with the work All use cases

Understand AI spending and value

See where the budget goes and what the business gets back.

Share one AI budget across your tools

Fund people, teams and projects across connected services.

Give your team more capacity

Reduce the preparation, checking and follow-up around recurring work.

Connect AI use to delivered work

Follow AI activity into projects, code and business results.
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Allow the Cloud Proxy through your network

Use this before your pilot if your firewall or web gateway only allows approved destinations, or if any of your AI provider accounts only accept requests from certain IP addresses.

Let your Macs reach Flowstate

  1. On your firewall or web gateway, allow outbound HTTPS on port 443 to proxy.flowstate.inc.
  2. Allow outbound HTTPS on port 443 to your Flowstate address, <your company>.flowstate.inc. The agent collects its list of AI services from there.
  3. If your gateway inspects encrypted traffic, exclude proxy.flowstate.inc from inspection. Each Mac sends your organisation’s Cloud Proxy token over this connection.

Allow Flowstate at your AI providers

The Cloud Proxy passes each conversation on to the AI provider itself, so the provider sees it coming from Flowstate’s network, not from your office. This only matters if you’ve limited a provider account to your own IP addresses, such as an IP allowlist on your Anthropic Console or OpenAI organisation, or a network rule on an Azure or Google Cloud resource.

  1. List the provider accounts that only accept requests from certain IP addresses.
  2. Ask your Flowstate contact for Flowstate’s outbound IP addresses for your data region. Your data region is shown at the bottom of your Flowstate sign-in page.
  3. Add those addresses to each provider account before you roll out to the Macs that use it.

Private AI endpoints

If you add a private hostname under Settings → AI → Cloud Proxy → Custom AI-service hostnames, requests to it also come from Flowstate’s network.

  • If the endpoint only accepts certain IP addresses, add Flowstate’s addresses to it.
  • If the endpoint can only be reached from inside your own network, talk to your Flowstate contact before you add it.

What your gateway sees afterwards

Once a Mac has the agent, your gateway sees its conversations with covered AI services as connections to proxy.flowstate.inc, not to the AI service’s own address. If you use gateway rules or reports that pick out AI services by address, review them before rollout. Traffic to everything else is unchanged.