Engagement & pricing
Engagement & pricing
A flat annual subscription on the spend the record administers. No share of savings, and here is why.
| Product | What it is | Fee |
|---|---|---|
| The record, and the desk watching | Read-only. Two weeks to the first print of the position, the commitments, and the budgets; the desk’s daily record once your job logs arrive: what you paid, what it would have bought and where, the supplier panel, the forward view, and the running total against a baseline agreed before it starts | 0.3–0.6% of spend under administration, tiered, with a floor for smaller fleets. $360k a year on a $60M fleet |
| Onboarding | Contract extraction and confirmation, the first reconciliation, the baseline agreement, the supplier panel — the hand-work of the first weeks, priced as what it is | Fixed, $40–120k by the number of suppliers and contracts; waived for design partners |
| The desk, acting | Execution under your written delegated authority, inside limits you set: an approval threshold, a concentration cap per supplier, the qualified panel only, your regions, and the project budgets it may draw on. Where a supplier’s terms bar a third party from ordering — AWS Capacity Blocks — the desk prepares and you submit | The subscription, plus a fixed fee per decision the desk places. Never per GPU-hour, never a share of savings |
| Purchase decision | One reservation, commitment, or renewal, with the requirement written first, up to three qualifying offers, the acceptance test written into the contract, and the decision record | Fixed, $25–60k by scope |
| Verification pilot | The chosen allocation tested on your own work before full commitment. Test spend is paid by you, directly to the supplier. Separately authorized — you can stop after the decision | Fixed, separately authorized |
| Back-cast | A past purchase re-run as the decision stood at the time. A diagnostic, not a saving | Fixed, small. Free for our first design partners |
| Design partners, the first three | Year one at the floor whatever the size of the fleet; onboarding waived; the back-cast free; the proposed tier applies at renewal; the anonymized result publishable, with your veto on every number. Each design partner has a purchasing event inside two quarters, so the subscription is judged against a real decision | $150k, year one (proposed) |
| Settlement Not offered | Paying suppliers on measured delivery. The one stage that would put us in the payment path, so it waits until the desk has acted for real and the credit and collateral machinery behind it exists | — |
Why no share of savings
A fee taken as a share of savings, charged on reported savings before they are reconciled, gives the adviser a reason to flatter the number — the one thing you cannot check. Utilitywise, then the largest UK energy broker, booked supplier commission on estimated consumption and agreed in 2017 to repay £7.6M when actuals came in lower; it entered administration in 2019 for several reasons, and a fee earned on an estimate was one of them. The lesson is narrow and it is ours: a fee charged before the number is reconciled gets flattered or clawed back. It is worse for a desk that watches than for anyone, because for ninety days every saving it reports is one it did not execute. The subscription sits where the energy advisory industry actually prices. Summit Energy managed about $20B of client spend on about $65M of revenue, roughly 0.3% (2010–11 company figures, across its service lines); on a $60M fleet our tier is $360k a year, on the whole bill and the commitments the record holds rather than on the movable share — inside what the FinOps platforms charge enterprises above $50M of cloud spend, and priced so you can carry it on a fleet where we find little and cancel after a year having lost a rounding error and kept the record. The published model charges that same $360k as a flat line on its default fleet, after the gross benefit and before the net, so the fee can be read against the gross. A price that only makes sense if we find a lot is a price that pressures us to find a lot. A savings share may be offered later, on reconciled actuals only, at your request.
Payment is never contingent on the answer being favorable. No purchasing authority is requested during the watch, and none is accepted if offered before you have read the record. The tiers are proposed and the execution fee is still being set. The first design partners pay the floor in year one and get the back-cast free, in exchange for permission to publish the anonymized result with a veto on every number; the subscription is paid, because whether it is worth paying for is the first thing being tested. Success gate, in the engagement: if the record cannot ingest and reconcile the agreed sources within sixty days of credentials, you terminate and keep the exports.