Cloudar announced Manthra during its own event, in the presence of more than 160 AWS employees. Manthra (Managed Anthropic on AWS) is a managed service that lets organizations roll out Anthropic’s Claude securely and predictably. The models run via Amazon Bedrock in a dedicated AWS environment, wrapped in a governance layer managed by Cloudar for compliance and cost control. Employees use Claude Desktop and Claude Code just as they’re used to.
Today, a company can acquire Claude in four ways: directly from Anthropic, via Amazon Bedrock, via Claude Platform on AWS, or via AWS Marketplace. Each route affects where data is processed and how billing works. On top of that, token usage from agentic tools such as Claude Code can quickly add up, with no cap. Many organizations also run into a more practical problem: they simply can’t purchase Claude today, because they lack a suitable master agreement or vendor relationship with Anthropic, or because something as basic as paying by credit card doesn’t fit their procurement process. In regulated organizations, adoption therefore gets stuck on a few questions: where does our data go, what will this cost, and how do we actually buy this?
From tool to managed service
The fact that AWS and Anthropic themselves released a self-hosted gateway for Claude Code and Claude Desktop confirms the direction: AI tools are no longer managed laptop by laptop, but through a governance layer the organization controls itself. Manthra brings that layer into production and manages it. Manthra also solves the procurement problem: the customer is billed via Cloudar or via AWS Marketplace, with whom a vendor relationship usually already exists, without having to set up its own master agreement with Anthropic or get stuck on practicalities such as paying by credit card.
“AI is maturing. What started as a tool employees tried out on their own is becoming a service the organization relies on, with the same expectations as the cloud: secure, predictable and managed. Yet many companies can no longer see the forest for the trees. There are several ways to acquire Claude, each with different implications for data and billing. Manthra takes over those choices and that management, so IT can focus on what AI delivers,” says Senne Vaeyens, co-founder at Cloudar.
What Manthra delivers
- Web interface: Manthra offers a simple web interface that lets IT and finance manage and track users, limits and usage: add new users, set spending limits, and see at a glance who is using what.
- Compliance: Inference runs within the EU. The customer chooses, per environment, between two retention profiles: Zero Data Retention (no storage of prompts and responses) or a Compliance & Audit profile with encrypted logging to a write-once S3 bucket with its own KMS keys, accessible only to audit teams. For the newest models that fall outside Zero Data Retention, use requires a deliberate opt-in. Amazon Bedrock Guardrails can detect and block personal or sensitive data [to confirm this is live]. Login runs via the existing identity provider (such as Entra ID or Okta), without persistent AWS keys on laptops.
- Cost control: Usage is billed per token at Bedrock rates, with no per-user license. Costs appear on the AWS bill or via Cloudar, whichever the customer prefers. Spending limits per user, group or organization are enforced in real time: once the cap is hit, the gateway blocks further requests until the period resets or an administrator raises the limit. Model access can be managed centrally, with alerts for runaway usage. Routine tasks can be routed to faster, cheaper models, while the heaviest models are reserved for complex work.
- Plug-and-play: The customer doesn’t need to handle complex technical configuration or deployment themselves, unless they want to: Cloudar sets up and manages the environment. Under the hood, the gateway runs as a container in a locked-down AWS VPC, with configuration that IT rolls out to laptops through existing tools (Intune or Jamf), invisible to the customer.
- Management: Cloudar deploys, patches and monitors the environment, makes new Claude models available as soon as they’re released, delivers periodic cost reports, and is the point of contact for incidents.
According to Senne Vaeyens, adoption in regulated organizations comes down to two questions: “Where does our data go, and what will this cost? With Manthra, we can show a CISO step by step where every prompt goes, and give a CFO a per-user cap before a single token is consumed. That’s when AI becomes something you dare to roll out broadly, with confidence.”
Manthra is available in two forms. With fully managed, Cloudar runs a dedicated AWS tenant. With configured on your tenant, Cloudar builds the environment in the customer’s own AWS account and hands it over, with optional support afterwards. Billing can run through Cloudar or through AWS Marketplace. Cloudar starts with a workshop involving business, IT and security, then delivers a plan covering phasing, timing and budget, and moves via a pilot with a handful of early adopters toward broader rollout.
