MEASURE
Measure adoption, output and quality.
Connect your existing AI vendors and source-control. Backlight reads usage events, code provenance, and CI signal — then attributes work to people, teams, and tools.
The honest read on your AI coding tool spend.
Backlight reconciles every AI invoice with the code your engineers actually shipped — across Copilot, Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, and more — so you can defend your spend in dollars before the next renewal.
Read-only access · metadata only · we never store source code
The problem
Engineering bought AI faster than it built
the instruments to measure it.
Spend is up, but executives can’t tell whether throughput, quality, or both are improving — and which dollars to keep funding.
The result is a measurement gap that grows every quarter. Teams adopt new vendors, sunset old ones, and route work between humans and assistants — while adoption is universal and accountability isn’t.
90%
of engineering teams now use AI coding tools
Jellyfish · 2025
29%
of executives can confidently measure AI ROI
IBM · 2025
1.7×
more issues in AI-authored changes
CodeRabbit · 2025
19%
longer task completion in controlled studies
METR · 2025
The platform
The instrument layer for AI in engineering.
Backlight reads from the AI tools, source-control, and billing systems your engineers already touch — and turns the signal into something leadership can act on.
OPTIMIZE
Surface seats that haven’t opened the editor in 30 days, then reclaim them.
Inactive seats, duplicated tooling, and licenses that never opened the editor get surfaced — with a recommended action and a dollar amount per line.
REPORT
Boardroom-ready output.
Monthly dossiers leadership can read end-to-end — vendor spend, code output, and quality trends in one document, designed to be forwarded to a CFO without translation.
Features
Five instruments, one measurement model.
COST MODEL
Cost per FTE-equivalent AI spend.
Roll up vendor invoices into a single per-engineer denominator your CFO already understands. Slice by team, level, geography, or cohort.
WASTE REPORTS
Dollar-value waste, not seat counts.
Inactive seats, overlap across vendors, abandoned trials. Each line item is dollar-denominated and exportable to your finance team.
ALERTS
Alerts that earn the page.
Quality drops, high-risk changes, sudden waste spikes. Routed to owners, not channels — with context, dollar amount, and a recommended action.
QUALITY
AI-attributed bug density and regression trends.
Map AI-assisted commits to the bugs they generate downstream. Spot teams or repos where assistance is producing more rework than throughput.
BENCHMARKS
Anonymous peer benchmarking.
See how your $/FTE, waste rate, and AI-attributed bug density compare to similarly-sized engineering orgs. Anonymous, opt-in, percentile-ranked.
Results
What teams get,
and when.
Outcomes pinned to a horizon. Not vision-deck language — these are the numbers customers point to in their renewal review.
DAY ONE
Visibility, immediately
Connect your billing, source-control, and identity providers and Backlight has a baseline by sundown.
01 / 04
- Utilization across every connected vendor
- License waste flagged with a dollar amount
- Owner-aware: every line item has a name
WITHIN ONE BILLING CYCLE
Spend, reduced
Before the next renewal, Backlight has paid for itself. The math is on the report.
02 / 04
- Per-tool waste consolidated into one ledger
- Reclaimed seats with one-click revoke
- CFO-readable monthly variance report
OVER TIME
Quality, trending up
A continuous read on AI-attributed code. Defect density bends downward; throughput bends up.
03 / 04
- Downward AI-attributed bug density
- Reduced churn on AI-assisted changes
- Higher PRs / seat across teams
BOARD-READY
Reports the C-suite uses
A monthly dossier with anonymous peer benchmarks and methodology footnotes leadership trusts.
04 / 04
- Anonymous peer benchmarks vs. industry
- Dollar-denominated ROI summary
- Methodology footnotes for every figure
Integrations
Connects in minutes. Read-only. Metadata only. We never store source code.
Connect once. Backlight reconciles vendor billing, source-control, identity, and project tools into one measurement surface — no agents, no instrumentation, no engineering lift.
GitHub Copilot
Cursor
Claude
ChatGPT
Gemini
Amazon Q
GitHub
GitLab
Bitbucket
Azure DevOps
Linear
Jira
Slack
Okta
Stripe