Managed Standard
Annual / 2-yr min
Business-hours incident response
Single-platform replacement. Infrastructure, security, compliance, incident response, and ongoing development. Ideal for companies that migrated one major module.
The per-seat model was built for humans in chairs. AI agents don't sit in chairs.
Every seat an agent replaces is pure margin, unless your vendor keeps charging you for it.
The Per-Seat Math
What 500 seats actually cost over five years.
Enterprise SaaS pricing is designed to grow faster than your headcount. Escalators, add-on SKUs, AI surcharges, and platform fees compound every renewal cycle. Here's the math your vendor hopes you won't do.
| SaaS Vendor | Custom Build | |
|---|---|---|
| 500 users, Year 1 | ~$1.3M–$2.0M | One-time build (scope confirmed in Assessment) |
| Year 2 (renewal + escalator) | ~$1.4M–$2.1M | MSA, no renewal escalator |
| Year 3 | ~$1.5M–$2.2M | MSA, flat year-over-year |
| Years 4–5 | ~$3.1M–$4.5M | MSA, flat year-over-year |
| 5-year total | $6M–$10M | A fraction of the vendor total |
| Net savings vs vendor midpoint | ~65–85% |
These numbers assume a mid-market deployment of one of the largest SaaS vendors. Other major-vendor deployments are typically higher. The custom build includes AI-assisted development, infrastructure, and ongoing maintenance.
They were quoted $54M. They built it for $2.64M.
Alberta's Ministry of Infrastructure killed a $54M four-year vendor procurement and built both replacement systems with a small internal team and modern AI tooling. $858K spent, 643 active users today, $2.64M projected to fully complete both. Roughly 95% less than the vendor proposal. The math isn't unique to Alberta. It's what AI-augmented engineering does to enterprise software economics.
Published April 2026 by Nate Glubish, Alberta Minister of Technology and Innovation.
The Double Ransom
They charge for the seats. Then they charge for the AI that replaces the seats.
One major SaaS vendor layers a $550/user/month AI seat upgrade, mandatory data-layer infrastructure at $65K–$175K/year, and per-conversation or per-action usage fees on top of the enterprise license you already pay. Another restructured its AI pricing into three paid tiers with metered token pools. You're paying for humans and the machines that replace them, simultaneously. That's the double ransom.
| What Your Vendor Charges | What We Build | |
|---|---|---|
| User access | $175–$500/user/mo | No per-seat pricing |
| AI seat upgrade | $550/user/mo (on top of enterprise tier) | None |
| Required agent infrastructure | $65K–$175K/yr data-layer tier | Your cloud, no extra cost |
| Conversation / action fees | $2/conv or $0.10/action | No vendor metering |
| Agent architecture ceiling | 15 topics × 15 actions per topic | None |
| Data access | Their silo only | Across your full operational data |
| Platform limits | Governor limits, API caps | No artificial limits |
A $550/user/month AI seat upgrade times 500 users equals $3.3M per year, before data-layer infrastructure, before conversation fees, before credit consumption. The same agent capability on a purpose-built system carries no per-seat ransom and no per-conversation metering. And the agent reads across your full operational data, your CRM, ERP, support records, documents, and data warehouse, not just what is inside one vendor's silo.
And it is not only the one we just priced. Another major enterprise SaaS vendor's April 2026 API policy formalized the agent-toll model at the contract layer: third-party AI agents acting on its data must now route through its own AI runtime, where access is metered. Whatever your incumbent said about openness, the binding text is the policy.
The Seat Problem
When AI handles 80% of tier-1 support, one vendor still charges for 200 seats.
The per-seat pricing model assumes humans in chairs. Every workflow routed through your platform requires a licensed user, even if that “user” is an automation that runs unattended. The vendor's revenue depends on the seat count never going down.
AI changes the economics fundamentally. Agents handle ticket triage, data entry, report generation, and first-response support. The humans who remain do higher-value work, but the vendor still charges the same per-seat rate for every one of them, plus a new surcharge for the AI layer.
Our pricing model assumes agents doing work. You pay for compute, not chairs. When automation reduces your headcount requirements, your software costs go down, not up.
After Migration
The MSA: what you pay after migration.
After migration, a single MSA replaces everything SaaS bundled: infrastructure, security, compliance, incident response, and development. All under a contract with defined SLAs.
Managed Growth
Annual / 2-yr min
Priority incident response
Multi-module or multi-platform. Expanded infrastructure, dedicated engineering capacity, quarterly roadmap planning, and priority incident response.
Managed Enterprise
Annual / 3-yr min
24/7 incident response
Full enterprise stack replacement. Dedicated team, 24/7 operations, compliance automation, and continuous development against your product roadmap.
Compare this structure to your current annual SaaS spend. The MSA replaces millions in annual vendor licensing, and includes active development at a 5-day-max change cadence, not just access. The specific fee is a function of the system's scope and SLA tier; we confirm it in the intake.
The Assessment is the small question with the answer to the big one.
70–120 hours. 2–3 weeks. You get a complete migration business case: what it costs to leave, what it costs to stay, and whether it's viable. If it's not, we tell you.
A demo-able artifact every day, working software in your hands every week.