AI Business Case: TCO, ROI, Payback Period and NPV

The full executive answer

Start with total cost of ownership, because ours is unusually clean: the subscription is effectively the whole cost. Pro at $649 a month is about $6,600 a year, Max at $1,799 about $18,000, roughly 17% less on annual billing; there is no implementation project, no per-token metering surprise — each tier includes a defined AI-usage allowance, with any overage governed by caps and alerts you control, not open-ended billing — and no hardware or integration retainer. For a mid-market company, three-year TCO on Pro is on the order of $17,000. I state that precisely because the return side cannot be stated precisely yet, and I want the asymmetry visible.

On return, I will give you a framework and let your own numbers drive it, because we are pre-launch and I refuse to invent customer ROI. The three value lines are: displaced analysis cost — board-level diagnostics of this type bought from a strategy firm run tens of thousands of dollars per engagement, and the platform produces structurally similar governed analyses on demand; cycle-time on decisions — finance understands the net-present-value cost of a quarter’s delay on a capital decision better than anyone; and avoided-loss value from systematic risk surfacing, which COSO’s enterprise-risk-management framework treats as a core value of formal risk processes. If a $6,600-a-year subscription displaces even a fraction of one external engagement, payback is measured in weeks — that arithmetic is yours to stress-test, and the trial exists so you can run it on a real use case at zero cost.

For net present value: with effectively zero upfront investment, monthly terms, and a 14-day free trial, the NPV calculation barely has a negative cash-flow period to discount — the honest financial risk here is not capital at risk, it is management attention. And one thing you will not get from most AI vendors: our own margin instrumentation. Every AI generation writes its exact cost to an append-only ledger, so if you want to audit what your subscription actually consumes in compute, the number exists to the fraction of a cent. We run our unit economics transparently because we expect CFOs to ask.