Pricing

There is no licence fee, no seat count and no minimum spend. We find, cut and keep your LLM savings, and the fee is a flat share of the reduction we verify against the invoice your provider sends you. Tidal Audit, Tidal Gateway and Tidal Telemetry come with the engagement and are not priced separately.

The short version: free audit, then a flat 20% of verified monthly savings, measured against a baseline locked before anything changes. No down payment, no minimum spend or engagement. No savings, no fee. Thirty days notice. Book the audit.

The audit is free and it is a real deliverable

The first stage costs nothing and ends with a written document: spend broken down by model, workload and team, the drivers behind it, and a ranked savings list with an effort cost against each item. About a week from the point read-only exports are available.

You can take that document and implement all of it in-house. Plenty of platform teams do, and that is a legitimate outcome rather than a failed sales cycle. The audit is free because a proposal written without seeing the invoice is guesswork, and because a team that reads its own numbers and decides it does not need help was never going to be a good engagement.

Then a flat 20% of verified savings

If you engage us to implement, the fee is 20% of the reduction, billed each period, for as long as the reduction holds. The rate is flat: we implement the changes through Tidal Gateway, which we deploy and operate in your cloud, and Tidal Telemetry measures the result.

In a period where the bill does not fall, the fee is zero. That is not a guarantee in the marketing sense, it is what a percentage of zero is.

What verified means, precisely

The model collapses if the baseline is soft, so this is the part worth reading slowly.

• The baseline is locked before any change ships and countersigned by both sides. It is built from raw provider invoices, not from a dashboard either side controls.
• It is normalised for volume. Savings are measured as cost per unit of work - per request, per conversation, per document processed - so a quiet period is not billed as an optimisation and a growth period does not erase one.
• Provider price cuts are excluded. A list-price drop lowers your bill without raising our fee.
• Reconciliation runs against the invoice each period and the statement shows the arithmetic. A line you dispute comes out until it is resolved.

What is deliberately not priced separately

Charging for these individually would create incentives we do not want, so they are included.

• The audit (Tidal Audit) and the readout call.
• Tidal Gateway, deployed and operated by us in your cloud, and Tidal Telemetry, the live cost view behind each monthly statement.
• Re-measurement after a provider price change or a model deprecation.
• Handover. Routing rules and configurations are yours when the engagement ends.

There is no licence fee on any of it. If there are no savings, there is no fee.

The incentive problems, stated plainly

Performance pricing has two well-known failure modes and naming them is fairer than hoping you do not.

• It rewards cutting cost over holding quality. The control: quality SLOs agreed per endpoint before anything ships, every change A/B tested for at least seven days, automatic rollback on regression - which takes the associated fee with it. A saving that degraded the product is not a saving and is not billed as one.
• It rewards a high baseline. The control: the baseline comes from invoices you already received before we arrived. There is no version of that number we get to draw.

When a fixed fee fits better

Performance pricing is wrong for some shapes of work. A one-off migration, an architecture review, or building out attribution and chargeback for a finance team is scoped work with a defined end, so it gets a fixed fee agreed up front. The percentage model is for ongoing optimisation of a live bill.

Next step: the audit costs nothing and ends with a number you can act on with or without us. Book a call, or email hello@finopsllm.com with your monthly spend and provider mix.

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