STOP RENTING
YOUR AI.
Most “AI consultants” connect your business to ChatGPT or Claude and charge you for the wiring. We build AI that lives in your office, runs on your hardware, and uses your data — without sending it anywhere. We set it up, train your team, and keep it running.
Three things changed. Suddenly this works for normal businesses.
Free AI got good.
A few years ago, the only good AI was locked behind ChatGPT or Claude. Today, there are free, open AI models that you can download and run yourself — and they are now good enough for the everyday work most businesses need: reading documents, answering questions, transcribing calls, summarizing notes.
The hardware got cheap.
A small computer that can run this AI in your office now costs between $1,500 and $5,000. Two years ago it cost $20,000+. The math finally works for normal businesses, not just tech giants.
The cloud AI bill is about to land.
Right now ChatGPT and Claude are remarkably cheap because the companies behind them are losing billions to grow. That ends. When the bills come due, every business that runs on monthly AI subscriptions is going to feel it.
The flat-rate AI era is ending. The bill is moving onto a meter.
Major AI providers are quietly shifting programmatic and agentic AI usage — the AI work that runs in the background, in your tools, on your behalf — off flat subscriptions and onto pay-per-use pricing. Anthropic moved first. OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google are months, not years, behind on the same move.
Subsidized flat-rate AI was a customer-acquisition tactic. It was never going to be the business model.
The effective price increase for programmatic AI work between flat-rate and metered pricing, per independent analyses. The more automated your team's AI use, the bigger the multiple.
$20–$200 per seat.
Predictable. Easy to expense. Every plan tier from basic ($20) to premium ($100–$200) covers automated AI usage within the same fixed monthly seat fee.
$300–$2,000 per power user.
The more automated and agentic the AI work, the bigger the bill. A single power user running automations daily can move from a flat $20–$200 seat into the $300–$2,000/month range — and you don't know the number until the bill arrives.
The work being repriced is exactly the work you're moving toward.
Notice what part of AI is being repriced first: agents, automations, scheduled jobs, AI embedded inside business tools. That is the main course. Casual chat-style AI is a side dish. Agentic AI runs without a human to slow it down, and it's the part of AI that's actually expensive to provide — so it's the part that gets metered first.
And the providers know it. In the same announcements that raise prices, they're shipping tools that let serious customers route work to AI on their own hardware. Anthropic's developer tooling already points at locally-hosted models. OpenAI offers private deployments. It's not a contradiction — it's a tell. They know which customers will leave the cloud first, and they'd rather still sell to them.
In-house by default. Cloud when it's worth it.
We sort each task in your business into two buckets: things that should run on your own hardware, and things where cloud AI is still better. Most things end up in-house — anything involving customer data, anything you run a lot of, anything where you don't want the bill to surprise you.
The rare tasks that genuinely need the smartest AI on Earth still go to ChatGPT or Claude — but only those tasks. You get the best of both, without overpaying for either.
In-house workflows
- Reading and comparing subcontractor bids
- Transcribing customer phone calls
- Answering questions about your company documents
- Turning voicemails into CRM tickets
- Reading intake forms and new leads
Why · Sensitive data, high volume, or needs to work offline
Cloud-routed workflows
- Heavy contract analysis and negotiation prep
- Drafting external marketing content
- Complex strategy or planning sessions
Why · Hard reasoning, low volume, not sensitive
Three sizes. Real numbers. No “contact sales” games.
The hardware itself is at cost plus a small handling fee. We make our living from setting it up well and keeping it running — not from marking up boxes.
Node S
1–5 people · one office · light use
- Hardware
- $1.5K – $2.5K
- Setup + Build
- $7.5K
- Monthly Support
- $1.5K / mo
- Year 1 Total
- ≈ $26K
- Small desktop computer that sits in a closet or under a desk
- 3–4 workflows running on day one
Node M
5–20 people · multiple workflows · document-heavy
- Hardware
- $4K – $6K
- Setup + Build
- $15K
- Monthly Support
- $3K / mo
- Year 1 Total
- ≈ $66K
- A capable workstation with a powerful graphics card
- 5–6 workflows running on day one
Node L
20–50 people · heavy daily use · whole-office tool
- Hardware
- $8K – $12K
- Setup + Build
- $30K
- Monthly Support
- $6K / mo
- Year 1 Total
- ≈ $122K
- A larger workstation built to handle constant demand
- 8+ workflows running on day one
The monthly plan covers: AI model updates, security patches, system monitoring, 1–2 new workflows per quarter, a quarterly business review, and a replacement-hardware promise. Need extra workflows beyond that? $2.5K–$7.5K each.
Slide your numbers in. See the bill shock.
Three sliders. Your team size, the share who use AI heavily, and what you pay per seat today. We'll show what that bill becomes once the flat-rate plans go away — and what it would cost to own the same capability instead.
The ones with AI open all day — developers, ops, analysts, anyone whose work depends on it
Basic plans run $20. Premium / max-tier plans across major providers run $100–$200. Drag higher if any of your power users are on a premium tier.
Independent analyses of the June 15 shift estimate effective price changes of 12× to 150×. In dollars, that's roughly $300–$2,000/mo per heavy user, depending on how automated their work is. Default is a conservative middle.
How this model works:
· Standard users (casual chat-style use): $20/mo today → ~$40/mo on metered pricing
· Power users (agents, automations, AI all day): the slider above sets the real-world token cost. The June 15 change moves programmatic and agentic AI work — exactly what your team is increasingly running — onto pay-per-use pricing.
· Modeled precisely against your actual workflows during the audit.
9 standard @ $20 + 6 power @ $50
9 standard @ $40 + 6 power @ $600
That's the additional cost per year your team's current AI usage becomes once flat-rate plans go metered — an effective 12× increase per power user.
At your team size, Year 1 with us is slightly above your new metered bill — but Year 2 onward your cost is flat at $36,000, while the cloud bill keeps climbing.
Your data stays in the building.
We don't pitch this to everyone. We pitch it to businesses whose data is part of what makes them money, or whose customers, regulators, or investors would have something to say about it being sent to a cloud AI provider.
“Your bid data shouldn’t live on someone else’s computer.”
Your subcontractor pricing, your customer list, your historical win rates — that is the moat. Cloud AI policies let you opt out of training, but they don’t guarantee your data stays in your country, let alone your office.
- Reading and comparing bids
- Answering questions about takeoff documents
- Summarizing RFIs
- Turning voicemails into project tickets
“HIPAA-friendly AI. On your hardware. Not someone else’s cloud.”
Intake forms, treatment notes, voicemails — all protected health information. Sending it to a cloud AI tool is a compliance risk most owners haven’t fully priced in.
- Reading intake forms
- Transcribing voicemails
- Drafting no-show follow-ups
- Cleaning up treatment notes
“AI your IC and LPs can defend.”
LPs and diligence teams are starting to ask: "Where exactly does your portfolio company’s data live?" Pointing at a server in the building is a much easier answer than pointing at a cloud provider’s terms of service.
- Summarizing deal documents
- Portfolio reporting
- Internal playbook search
- Operating dashboards
“AI that respects fiduciary duty.”
Client confidentiality is the entire business model. Putting client data into a cloud AI tool is a structural risk, not a productivity hack.
- Summarizing documents
- Cleaning up meeting notes
- Internal Q&A on your files
- Client intake
Hard questions. Straight answers.
The tradeoffs and the pushback we get most often — addressed up front, not hidden behind a sales conversation.
ChatGPT and Claude are fine for us — why change?
For which tasks? We help you figure out which AI tasks involve customer data, financial data, or things you would not want sitting on a competitor’s server. Those move in-house. Everything else stays where it is. The case is rarely "everything" — it is "the parts that matter most."
Aren’t cloud AI tools always going to be smarter than something we run ourselves?
For the hardest tasks, yes — for now. So we use them where they matter. Every setup we build is a mix: cloud AI handles the genuinely difficult reasoning; in-house AI handles the high-volume, sensitive, repetitive work that makes up most of your day. You get the best of both, without overpaying for either.
Isn’t the upfront cost a big check to write?
It is a real check — between $1,500 and $12,000 for hardware, plus setup. The reframe: add up what your team already pays today across ChatGPT, Claude, call-note tools, and AI features bolted into your other software. For most 20-person businesses that is already $1,300–$2,500 a month. Our plan lands in the same range — but it is fixed, and at the end of the year you own a working system instead of twelve months of subscription receipts.
We don’t have an IT team to keep this running.
That is exactly what the monthly support plan is for. We are your IT team for this system. You don’t touch it. We monitor it, update the AI models, patch security, and add new workflows. Running this yourself without support is a recipe for it to break inside six months — that is the honest truth, and the plan exists because of it.
What if the hardware breaks? What if FoxTrove goes away?
Hardware: a replacement ships within 48 hours, and your setup and workflows are backed up and restorable. Covered by the plan. FoxTrove: the software running on your hardware is open-source, you own the hardware, every workflow is documented. You can walk away clean at any time. No lock-in by design.
Will this replace everything else we use?
No. If Microsoft 365 Copilot is working, or a vertical SaaS tool you already pay for does the job — we leave them alone. We do not replace what works. We replace the parts where cloud AI is exposing you to data risk, unpredictable bills, or both.
Find out if this is a fit for your business.
Start with our audit. We walk through how your team is using AI today, score each task on how sensitive and how repetitive it is, and tell you honestly what belongs in-house, what belongs in the cloud, and what should stay exactly where it is.