Pricing

There is no licence fee, no seat count and no platform minimum, because there is no platform being sold. This is people doing work on your bill, and the fee is a share of the reduction they produce, verified against the invoice your provider sends you.

The short version: free audit, then 15-25% of verified monthly savings, measured against a baseline locked before anything changes. No savings, no fee. Thirty days notice. Minimum engagement is $20k/month of LLM spend. 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 15-25% of verified savings

If you engage us to implement, the fee is a share of the reduction, billed each period, for as long as the reduction holds. Where it lands in the band depends on how much of the implementation sits with us rather than your engineers, and on the term.

• Nearer 15% when your team implements against our specifications and we review, measure and verify.
• Nearer 25% when we write and operate the routing, caching and batching changes and carry the on-call for them.

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 and the readout call.
• Re-measurement after a provider price change or a model deprecation.
• Handover. Routing rules, configurations and the measurement setup are yours and stay yours when the engagement ends.

One thing genuinely is not included: no dashboard is licensed to you. If continuous cost observability is something you want to own and operate, that is a separate product with separate pricing, and it does not require an engagement.

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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