01
What is genuinely fixed.
The assessment at $2,500 and the monthly at $500. Both are published, neither moves with headcount, and the monthly can be stopped without affecting whether the platform runs. Budget them as known quantities.
Every price we charge is on the pricing page, and the largest line on your bill is one we never touch.
Bounded exposure with stage gates, not NPV theatre.
A business case built on an invented percentage is worse than no business case, because it commits the organization to defending a number nobody sourced. What we offer instead is a small first commitment, a published ladder, compute that never passes through us, and a measure your own function sets before anything is built.
Four commitments, each one small enough to stop.
THE SHAPE · 01
The exposure is staged deliberately, and every stage has a decision at the end of it that finance can make on evidence rather than on enthusiasm. Nothing is due at signing, and the largest recurring line, compute, is billed to you by your cloud provider rather than by us.
- 01$2,500, once
Strategic assessment
Bounded, with a defined deliverable: a network topology and data-flow map of your organization. You keep it whether or not you proceed, which means the money buys an artifact rather than a conversation.
GateDoes a governed capability create enough value here to continue?Decides: your executive sponsor - 02From $2,500
Deployment
Typically lands around $5,000 once the solutions pipeline is scoped. Milestone invoicing, nothing at signing. The variance between the two figures is scope, and it is agreed in writing before the first milestone.
GateIs the scope written down, and does each milestone have an acceptance test?Decides: your finance owner - 03$500 a month
Managed operations
Cancel anytime. The fee buys releases rolled deliberately, drift checks, acceptance runs against your live deployment, catalogue refreshes, access changes, cost watch with budget alarms and a dated operations journal. It does not buy access to your own platform.
GateIs the operations journal worth $500 a month to read?Decides: you, monthly - 04Per deliverable
Automation and forward-deployed engineering
Scoped per deliverable, with no standing commitment. Longer engagements are priced in the range of one junior technical hire, without the permanent headcount. This is the only line that grows, and it grows one signed deliverable at a time.
GateDid the last deliverable move the measure your team set?Decides: your finance owner and the process owner
Everything we charge.
THE LADDER · 02
01
Strategic assessment
$2,500once
Bounded. The deliverable is yours whether or not you proceed.
Fixed · one time
02
Deployment
$2,500from
Typically lands around $5,000 once the solutions pipeline is scoped. Milestone invoicing, nothing at signing.
Scoped · milestones
03
Managed operations
$500per month
Cancel anytime. You lose us, not the platform.
Recurring · cancellable
| Line | Price | Behaviour | Who bills it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strategic assessment | $2,500 | ✓Fixed, one time | Us |
| Deployment, first engagement | From $2,500, typically around $5,000 | △Scoped, invoiced at milestones, nothing at signing | Us |
| Managed operations | $500 a month | ✓Fixed, cancel anytime | Us |
| Automation and forward-deployed engineering | Scoped per deliverable | △Variable, and only when you sign one | Us |
| Compute and platform infrastructure | Provider list price | △Variable with usage, visible to you daily | ✕Your cloud provider, directly |
| Per-seat charges | None | ✓There is no seat model | Nobody |
Currency is CAD. There is nothing underneath this table: no setup fee held back, no minimum term on the monthly, no per-user charge that appears at a headcount threshold, and no markup on compute, because we never sit between you and the compute bill. The operational knowledge gateway, our second product, has no published price and is scoped in the assessment.
The largest cost is one we never touch.
THE BIG LINE · 03
Direct billing, by design
Your provider invoices you at list price. There is nothing for us to mark up.
Compute runs in a cloud account you own and are billed for directly. That is an architectural fact before it is a commercial one, and it is the reason the incentive to grow your inference bill does not exist on our side of the table.
- 01Platform infrastructure, excluding inference. What we have seen: roughly $5 to $10 a month at Baseline, and about $110 a month on the private-network tiers. Presented as observed, not as a quote.
- 02Light team usage, all in. One deployment with light usage has run an estimated $40 to $120 a month on the client's cloud bill, with a budget alarm set at the top of that range.
- 03Per question, illustrative. A knowledge question of about 10,000 tokens in and 1,000 out costs roughly 4 to 5 cents at a mid-tier frontier model's list price, on the order of $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output. An estimate, not a quote.
- 04Metered per person, settled against the provider's record. Not an application counter. Quotas fail closed. Known limit: metering covers the home region, and a failed settlement deliberately overstates rather than understates.
usage · per person · current period
SETTLED
usage --by-person --period current
[meter] settled against provider invocation records
Person A · quota 2,000,000✓ 1,180,400 tokens
Person B · quota 2,000,000✓ 240,900 tokens
Person C · quota 500,000△ 498,100 tokens
Person C · next request✕ refused, quota reached
Budget alarm · cloud account
tokens only · the product holds no currency
Illustrative outputexit 0
Per-person metering·Quotas fail closed, in tokens
The number we will not give you.
THE REFUSAL · 04
We will not quote an ROI figure. Here is what replaces it
No measured business outcome exists that we are entitled to quote, so there are no case-study results, no named references and no percentage improvements anywhere on this site. An ROI number requires a baseline, and no baseline exists until your team sets one. The mechanism that replaces the figure: we help build that baseline during the first phase, agree the measure in writing before anything is built, and report against it monthly as a working target rather than a promised result. A supplier who hands you a payback figure in the first meeting has computed it from your inputs and their hope.
Working targets, never a target stated as a result.The rule we hold ourselves to in every report
02
What is genuinely variable.
Compute, which tracks usage and is visible on your own cloud bill daily, and per-deliverable automation, which only exists when you sign one. Budget alarms are set with you during deployment and watched as part of managed operations.
What we ask of finance.
THE ASK · 05
Appoint a finance owner for the baseline and the monthly review, and release each stage on evidence rather than on schedule. That is the whole ask. A finance function that holds the gates makes this engagement better, because the gates are the only mechanism either of us has for stopping something that is not working while it is still cheap to stop.
01What is the realistic first-year total?
The components, rather than a single number, because the two variable lines are genuinely yours. Fixed from us: $2,500 for the assessment, deployment from $2,500 and typically around $5,000, then $500 a month. Variable: your cloud bill, which on a light-usage deployment we have seen run an estimated $40 to $120 a month, plus any automation you choose to scope. Nothing at signing.
02Is there a minimum term?
Not on managed operations. Cancel anytime and the platform keeps running in your account, because it is deployed there rather than hosted by us. Deployment work is invoiced at milestones, so an engagement stopped midway is paid to the last accepted milestone.
03How do we stop compute costs running away?
Three mechanisms, all of them yours to see: per-person token quotas that fail closed, budget alarms on the cloud account set during deployment, and per-person usage settled against the provider's own record of each call so the numbers reconcile with the invoice. Cost watch is part of the monthly service. The detail is here.
04Why does the deployment price have a range?
Because the scope genuinely varies, and a range is more use to you than an average of it. It starts at $2,500 and typically lands around $5,000 once the pipeline of work is scoped with you. The scope is agreed before the first milestone is invoiced, so the range closes before you commit.
05Do you mark up the compute?
No, and the reason is structural rather than a promise: the cloud provider bills you directly at list price and we never sit between you and that invoice. There is no reseller arrangement to inspect, because there is no reseller arrangement.
⎯⎯ Book the strategic assessment ⎯⎯
Your private AI, inside your control ·
$2,500, bounded, with a deliverable you keep. It is the cheapest way to find out whether the rest of the ladder is worth climbing.