What it costs/hours first

How many hours a week is your team spending on this workflow?

Your real cost is hours a week, not licence price. Multiply your clients by the touchpoints each one takes in a cycle, then by the minutes somebody spends rebuilding context before each touchpoint. The number is usually larger than anyone expected, and licences are the small part. Put your three numbers in and the rest follows.

no vendor pricesno OCTYN pricenothing leaves your browser

The arithmetic, on your own numbers

count
per cycle
minutes
weeks

The numbers in the boxes are a worked example. Replace all four. Nothing here leaves your browser.

Fig.A · a week of context rebuilding83 / wk
A week of touchpoints stacking into five day columns against an hour scale, crossing one hour and two hours, then most of the stack draining away and a dashed line left where the week reached.
Hours a week11about 1.4 working days of somebody, every week
Touchpoints a week83
Minutes a cycle2,640
Hours a year506
Working weeks used46
Currency
01 / What you run todayRead these off the invoice and the calendar rather than estimating. The numbers in the boxes now are a worked example, not research. Replace all of them.
seats
per month
per month
per month
per month
count
per week
per month
02 / What an hour and a renewal cost youThe increase figure should come from your own last two renewals. We do not supply one, because a number quoted from somebody else's price page is wrong by the time you read it.
per hour
percent
03 / What you think a built version changesYour estimate, not ours. Runtime spend usually stays: model calls cost the same whoever makes them. If you think nothing changes, leave these equal to the numbers above and the model will tell you not to build.
per month
per month
per week
per month
count
04 / The budget you are weighingA one-off figure you are considering, from whoever you are considering. This page carries no price of its own.
one off
Break-even
Month 15

On your numbers the built version has cost less in total by month 15, counting the one-off budget, the licences at your own increase rate, runtime, and the hours at $45 each.

12 months, today$21,720
12 months, built$25,580
36 months, today$66,165
36 months, built$36,917
12m24m36m

today, cumulativebuilt, cumulative

DimensionTodayBuilt
Licence costSeats times per-seat price, plus the flat platform fee.$340$60
Licence-increase exposureThe same licences in year three, at the annual increase from your own renewals.$397$70
Maintenance attentionHours a month first, because hours are the unit this is really paid in.30 h$1,3506.3 h$285
Runtime costModel, API and hosting spend. It does not go away when you build.$120$120
Dependency countEvery third party is a price change, an outage and a terms update you do not control.63
Cost to change at six monthsNot a number. Four buckets: configuration, a contained code change, a large one, a rebuild.Which bucket? →

At 10,000 runs a month you are doing about 329 a day. That is the volume where per-task pricing, provider rate limits and debugging all change character at once. What changes at that volume →

break-evenmonth 15

What the six lines mean

Most cost comparisons stop at the first one, and the buyer meets the rest in year two.

  • Licence cost. Seats times per-seat price, plus the flat platform fee.
  • Licence-increase exposure. The same licences in year three, at the annual increase from your own renewals.
  • Maintenance attention. Hours a month first, because hours are the unit this is really paid in.
  • Runtime cost. Model, API and hosting spend. It does not go away when you build.
  • Dependency count. Every third party is a price change, an outage and a terms update you do not control.
  • Cost to change at six months. Not a number. Four buckets: configuration, a contained code change, a large one, a rebuild.

Why there is no price on this page

A comparison that quotes somebody else's prices is wrong within a quarter and arguable the moment it is published, because your plan, your region and your contract are not the ones that got quoted. Worse, a reader who catches one stale figure reads every other number on the site as a sales artefact.

There is no OCTYN price in the model either. The build column takes a budget you enter and reports the month it pays back. A calculator that pre-fills its own seller's price has stopped being a model.

Where to read your own numbers

Take the figures off your own invoices first. Where you need a public rate card, these are the pages to read, and no figure from any of them is copied onto this page. Each URL was loaded and returned a live page on 2026-09-14.

The line this model cannot price

Cost to change at six months is the sixth dimension and it is deliberately not a number. It is a bucket: configuration, a contained code change, a large one, or a rebuild. Ask whoever is quoting you which bucket your three most likely changes land in, and whether they will tell you the expensive answer when it is the true one.

Bring the numbers you just typed. The consult starts from those.

Book a call →