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Flowstate Helm

Know what AI costs. See what you get back.

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

Recent insights All insights

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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Docs / Flowstate Router

Turn on routing for your workspace

Routing sends AI requests through Flowstate on their way to the AI service. People keep signing in to their AI services as usual. This page is for admins. For the idea behind it, see Flowstate Router and How routing works.

You need access to manage Flowstate Helm settings. Ask your Flowstate admin.

Choose your routing preferences

  1. Go to Settings → Routing.
  2. Under Route requests for, choose Users for your team’s requests or Agents for your applications. Each has its own preferences.
  3. Under Routing preferences:
    • Turn on Intelligent routing to move simple prompts to a cheaper model from the same provider. With it off, requests keep the model they asked for and still pass through Flowstate.
    • Turn on Automatic failover to send requests to a Flowstate-hosted model when an AI service isn’t responding.
  4. Select Save changes.

Under Available models, select Manage to choose which models each team and tool can be routed to.

Both preferences are off by default. Flowstate doesn’t promise a saving from intelligent routing. What you save depends on your prompts and your models.

Failover sends requests to models that Flowstate hosts. It needs your explicit consent before it can run. Read the consent wording when you turn it on, and confirm only if your security and compliance teams agree.

Without consent, a request to an AI service that’s down fails as it would without Flowstate.

How people are recognised

Flowstate recognises each person from the AI account they sign in with, such as a Claude subscription, a ChatGPT sign-in, Google or an API key. It then links that account to your workspace.

Flowstate links an account only from sources it can verify:

  • Your AI provider integrations. The people your connected AI providers report as users in your organisation.
  • Service-account API keys. Flowstate Helm sends the router a hash of each key, never the key itself.
  • Flowstate Desktop sign-ins. When someone signed in to Flowstate Desktop uses their Claude, ChatGPT or Google sign-in, Flowstate links that account to them.

A work email address on its own is never used.

  • An account that another workspace already tracks is never taken over. Flowstate Helm shows “This account is already tracked by another workspace” instead. The other workspace has to remove it first.
  • People who aren’t linked are refused. This keeps the router from being an open relay.
  • A person who is refused sees a 403 error in their tool. Check that their AI provider is connected and reports them, or that they’ve used the account with Flowstate Desktop.
  • A change reaches the router within a couple of minutes.

People don’t need a Flowstate key.

Connect your team

Choose how your team’s AI requests reach Flowstate.

  • Point tools at Flowstate Router. Each person, or your platform team, changes one setting per tool. See Connect your AI tools.
  • Roll out Flowstate Desktop. Put Flowstate Desktop for Mac or Flowstate Desktop for Windows on company computers with your device management tool. See Flowstate Desktop.

Connect your application

  1. On Settings → Routing, choose Agents, then select Set up beside Connect your application.
  2. Under Connect a Service Account, store your provider keys in a service account. Select Manage Service Accounts to open them.
  3. Select Create Agent Key. The Agent Key signs your application in to Flowstate.
  4. Point your application at Flowstate using the Agent Key’s endpoint and sign-in details.

Check what Flowstate decided

Flowstate records the decision for every request: the model asked for, the model that answered, and whether the request was moved or failed over. Use these records to check routing before you widen it.

If something’s not right