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Plutus vs Vantage: the chart that explains itself
Vantage tells you what you spent. Plutus tells you what was happening when it moved.
Both publish prices instead of asking you to book a call. Both connect OpenAI and Anthropic. Both have an MCP server. The difference is what you get on Tuesday morning when spend jumps 18%.
Vantage’s figures below come from its pricing page, integrations page and docs, read on 14 October 2026.
The chart answers the question
Spend jumped. Now someone has to find out why.
Plutus puts the answer on the chart. GitHub releases and merged pull requests, PagerDuty incidents, Jira fix versions, Vercel production deploys, Linear issues, Sentry errors, Salesforce onboarding and churn, and Stripe subscriptions all land on your cost charts automatically. The chart lines them up with the spend. It does not claim any of them caused it, and you do not type any of them in.
Vantage has annotations too. You add them by hand, or they appear when a cost or budget alert fires. Its docs mention deployment events as a use for annotations and list no integration that pulls in deploys, releases or incidents. Someone still has to open the deploy log.
Pricing
Both tools price by tracked spend. Plutus gives you more of it at the same price.
Vantage:
| Vantage | Price | Tracked cloud spend | Users | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | Free | $2,500 | 3 | 6 months |
| Pro | $30/mo | $7,500 | 5 | 6 months |
| Business | $200/mo | $20,000 | 10 | 12 months |
| Enterprise | Custom | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Plutus:
| Plutus | Price | Tracked spend | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | Free | $10,000 | 6 months |
| Starter | $29/mo | $30,000 | 6 months |
| Growth | $149/mo | $100,000 | 1 year |
| Scale | $499/mo | $500,000 | 1 year |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom |
$29 a month buys 30,000 of tracked spend on Plutus. $30 a month buys 7,500 on Vantage. Plutus Growth is $149 for 100,000, where Vantage Business is $200 for 20,000. “Tracked spend” is each vendor’s own definition, so read both pricing pages for what counts.
AI spend
Both tools break OpenAI and Anthropic spend down to the API key. Plutus labels the Anthropic per-key dollars as estimated, because Anthropic’s cost report has no per-key breakdown. The per-key post shows how it works.
In Plutus that AI spend sits on the same chart as your cloud bill and the releases that went out. Your OpenAI line jumps and the deploy that changed the prompt is on the same axis. Plutus covers OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, xAI, Fireworks AI, Hugging Face and LiteLLM.
Read-only by default
Plutus reads your spend and explains it. It does not buy commitments, resize anything or hold write access to your cloud accounts. Nothing it does can change your bill. Its MCP server lets Claude or ChatGPT query your costs and set up budgets, dashboards and alerts.
Which to pick
Pick Plutus if your first question about a jump is what shipped, broke or onboarded, or if you track more than $7,500 a month and want to stay under $30.
Pick Vantage if you want it to manage AWS Savings Plans for you, or you spend on a provider only it lists, such as Cursor or ElevenLabs.
Each has a free tier. Connect both and see which chart answers the question first.