tokener is a self-hosted FinOps gateway that sits between your developers' Claude Code (and production AI agents) and Amazon Bedrock, inside your own AWS account. Every request is measured by developer, session, tenant, and model; auxiliary work is routed to cost-efficient models; and daily USD budgets are enforced before runaway sessions inflate your AWS bill.
Claude Code re-sends the whole conversation on every turn of its agent loop. For a ten-person engineering team, the monthly Bedrock token bill quickly lands in the $2,500 to $4,000+ range, and AWS Cost Explorer cannot tell you which developer, repository, session, or subagent drove it.
Every tool call is a turn, and every turn carries up to 100K+ tokens of context. A long session costs far more than a short one, but without request-level telemetry no one knows which sessions are bleeding budget.
Subagents, session titles, summaries, and context compaction run on the same top-tier Opus model as the main reasoning loop unless a policy layer steers them to Sonnet or Haiku.
Amazon Bedrock bills the AWS account, not the individual engineer. One runaway agent loop or oversized 20K-token build log looks identical to productive engineering until the invoice arrives.
tokener implements Claude Code's official gateway protocol. It authenticates the developer, applies deterministic policy, checks daily USD/token limits, signs the request with SigV4 for Amazon Bedrock, and streams the SSE response back unchanged while recording token telemetry. Conversation content is transformed in memory and never stored on disk.
The administrator creates a developer profile in the console and receives a scoped token plus a ready-made settings block.
The developer pastes it into ~/.claude/settings.json, runs claude, and sees the gateway under /status.
No IAM credentials ever reach a laptop, and models in the /model menu come live from Amazon Bedrock.
// ~/.claude/settings.json on each developer machine { "env": { "ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL": "https://claude-gw.internal.company.com", "ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN": "cgw_live_9f8a...", "CLAUDE_CODE_GATEWAY_HINT_HEADERS": "1", "CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_GATEWAY_MODEL_DISCOVERY": "1" } }
Every request is logged by developer, session, model, and request class: main conversation, subagent, auxiliary background, or compaction.
Deterministic transformations to the request body. The same input always produces the same output, keeping Anthropic prompt caching 100% valid.
Per-developer and per-team limits configured in the console and enforced on the very next turn with zero redeployments.
Naive gateways mutate conversation history or swap models mid-thread, which invalidates the Anthropic prompt cache and breaks extended thinking blocks - costing more than they save. Every change tokener makes is cache-stable for the life of a session.
Modeled for ten developers on Claude Opus, six sessions per day, at standard Bedrock pricing. Each lever is a single toggle in the admin console; effects compound cleanly.
| Optimization Lever | What Changes | Quality Risk | Team Spend Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Background work to Haiku | Session titles and background summaries leave the top-tier Opus model | None | -4% |
| Subagents to Sonnet | Explore and Plan subagents search and summarize on Sonnet | Low | -6% |
| Tool output trimming | A 20K-token build log is trimmed to ~5K and stops being re-billed on every subsequent turn | Low | -9% |
| Effort xhigh → high | Right-sized thinking budget on routine coding tasks | Measure per team | -14% |
| Phase 1 · Safe policies only | $2,560 → $2,070 / month (10-engineer pod) | Zero UX impact | -19% |
| Phase 2 · Safe policies + effort tuning | $2,560 → $1,720 / month (10-engineer pod) | Measured pilot | -33% |
The gateway infrastructure itself (ECS Fargate, ALB, DynamoDB, CloudWatch) runs inside your AWS account for ~$75 to $110/month and is paid back by the first 3% of token savings.
A fast, single-page console served directly by the gateway inside your VPC: Dashboard, Requests, Sessions, Developers, Models, Policy, and System Audit Log.
tokener deploys via CloudFormation or Terraform directly into your AWS account. Prompts and code travel strictly from developer machines to your private ECS Fargate tasks and Amazon Bedrock - never touching an external SaaS proxy.
Both Amazon Bedrock invocation paths are supported: Mantle (the native Anthropic Messages API endpoint on Bedrock) and Runtime (classic InvokeModel with us., eu., apac., or global. inference profiles).
Deploy the CloudFormation or Terraform module with your ACM certificate and allowed admin CIDR ranges in any Bedrock-enabled AWS region.
~8 minutesCreate a Route 53 alias/CNAME to the load balancer and retrieve the generated admin token from AWS Secrets Manager.
~5 minutesCreate developer profiles with daily USD budgets and model allowlists. Distribute each engineer's 6-line Claude Code settings block.
1 minute per devRun in pure observability mode for week one, inspect the session cost curves, then enable Haiku/Sonnet routing and output trimming.
19% to 33% savingsStandardized AI skills and custom FastMCP servers across Claude Code, Cursor, and Gemini CLI delivering 10x engineering velocity and ~60% faster onboarding.
Explore Loop Engineering →Open-source dbt package automating Hybrid Data Vault 2.0 (Raw + Business Vault) to dimensional Kimball star schemas, accelerating analytics delivery by 30%+.
Explore Data Vault IP →Stateful C++/PyArrow micro-batch Parquet engine sustaining ~300,000 records/sec under 80 MB RAM at 1/10th the CPU/RAM footprint of Apache Spark.
Explore Streaming Core →Tell us your engineering team size and primary AWS Bedrock region. Our principal architects will help you deploy tokener in your AWS account and review your first week of session telemetry together.
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