Nobody owns a cost they can't see.
AI Infrastructure & Unit Economics. I'm Tim Urista, a Senior Cloud Engineer at Apple — I make compute fleets legible and their costs attributable, from $10–12M/quarter of cloud spend to the per-signal economics of the AI systems I run myself.
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90-day AI implementation plan + readiness checklist + failure mode worksheet
Three Scales, One Discipline
Cost Attribution at Scale
Fleet-wide financial attribution across ~700K servers and $10–12M/quarter of cloud spend. Cost data as an engineering artifact, not an accounting afterthought.
AI Unit Economics
Fully-loaded cost per inference, per request, per signal. I run production AI whose invoice I personally pay — ~$1.50–2.00 per signal on Trendvesting.
Legible Infrastructure
Internal platforms like cloudOS (~400 weekly users) that make livability, deployment state, and spend visible to Finance, SRE, and executives alike.
See the discipline, live
Not a demo chatbot — a working cost-attribution tool. Describe your workload; get a number you could take to finance.
AI Cost Teardown
Describe an AI or cloud workload in plain English. You'll get a fully-loaded monthly estimate, a per-unit cost, and the highest-leverage ways to cut it. Live, powered by Claude.
Selected Work
View All CasesFleet-Scale Cost Attribution — Apple
Financial attribution pipeline (CIBO/FinTrack) correcting misattribution across ~700K servers, where quiet errors distort budgets by millions. Now piloting LLM inference to pre-label project cost hierarchies.
Cost-Attribution Pipeline — Roku
Built the pipeline tracking $10–12M/quarter of AWS spend and co-led the ECS→Kubernetes migration. Cost data treated as an engineering artifact, not an accounting afterthought.
Trendvesting — Unit Economics in Production
AI signal-intelligence platform live since Feb 2024. A real AI system whose invoice I personally pay — ~$1.50–2.00 fully loaded per signal, ~$400–500/month steady state.
TendForm — Infrastructure Discipline, Solo
My solo SaaS form builder with multi-form packets, a markdown DSL, a production MCP integration, and a HIPAA-compliant tier on a CloudNativePG enclave with a full BAA chain. Run like the fleet work, just smaller.
Latest Writing
All Articles on MediumThe FinOps Tax on AI Engineer Salary Premiums
Why the cost of AI talent is itself a line item most orgs never attribute — and what that hidden tax does to unit economics.
Unexpected Costs of Fragmented AI Governance
AI governance sprawl is a hidden cost center: every disconnected policy, tool, and review adds spend nobody attributes back to it.
Beyond Tokens: How BLT Solves the $10B Language Model Crisis
Tokenization is a hidden tax on every model. How byte-latent transformers attack the $10B cost problem at the architecture level.
Books
All BooksB*tch Slapped
Raw, practical essays on thriving through life's chaos while building tech careers.
Go Snowflake LLM
Build scalable LLM solutions for startups using Go and modern infrastructure.
LLM
Trendvesting Podcast
All EpisodesEpisode 15: AI Trading Strategies
Deep dive into using machine learning for automated trading decisions and risk management.
Episode 14: Infrastructure Scaling
Lessons learned from scaling Kubernetes infrastructure at high-growth companies.
Do you actually know what your AI costs?
Let's run a cost & unit-economics teardown — attribute the spend, find the waste, and get a number you can defend to finance.
AI Infrastructure & Unit Economics — weekly
One substantial piece a week on making AI infra legible and its costs attributable: real invoices, cost-attribution patterns, and production teardowns.