Pay when savings are reconciled.
Brickcost pricing is designed for CFO-level auditability: the diagnostic can be fixed-fee, and any success-based charge only applies when a customer-approved change produces billing-reconciled savings inside an agreed measurement window.
Outcome Definition
A billable savings outcome occurs when Brickcost identifies an approved remediation, the customer applies it or authorizes an owner-applied change, and post-change usage shows billing-reconciled savings against the agreed baseline without an SLA breach, rollback, or reopened issue inside the measurement window.
Read-only findings, modeled estimates, AI-readiness findings, metric-reconciliation findings, and telemetry-only AI token findings are not success-fee savings outcomes unless a separate written outcome definition is agreed.
Commercial Options
| Package | How it is billed | Best fit |
|---|---|---|
| Read-only diagnostic | Fixed fee, credited toward an annual subscription when the customer converts. | POCs, consulting-led assessments, and first-pass Databricks savings audits. |
| Platform subscription | Annual platform fee based on workspace scope, refresh cadence, and export needs. | Continuous readiness monitoring, executive reporting, and operating graph workflows. |
| Success fee | Optional percentage of billing-reconciled savings, subject to customer caps. | Customers who want Brickcost compensation tied to measurable savings. |
Billable Savings Examples
- A SQL warehouse is right-sized after approval, latency guardrails pass, and the measurement window shows reconciled DBU savings versus the agreed baseline.
- A dashboard refresh schedule is reduced after owner approval, business freshness is still met, and warehouse usage decreases after demand normalization.
- A repeated query pattern is replaced with a customer-approved materialized view, validation passes, and net compute savings exceed refresh/build cost.
- A job compute remediation reduces retry, startup, or idle-tail cost while failure rate and runtime remain within agreed limits.
Non-Billable Examples
- The scanner finds an opportunity, but the customer rejects, defers, or does not apply the change.
- The workflow is abandoned, demand drops for unrelated business reasons, or the result cannot be tied to the remediation.
- The change causes an SLA breach, rollback, reopened issue, or unacceptable user impact inside the measurement window.
- The finding is telemetry-only, modeled-only, or blocked by missing billing, contract-price, or baseline evidence.
- The deliverable is a metric reconciliation, AI/BI readiness score, grounding pack, or governance backlog item rather than a savings remediation.
Controls
Budget caps
Customers can set monthly or pilot-level caps before any success-fee overage is possible.
Approval gates
No remediation counts unless the customer approves the finding, owner, baseline, and measurement method.
Usage review
Admins can inspect billable events, pause measurement, approve top-ups, and export the savings ledger.
Auditability
Every billable savings event is backed by a ledger entry that procurement, finance, and platform owners can inspect.
| Field | What Brickcost records |
|---|---|
| Event identity | Finding ID, resource or workflow ID, workspace/domain, owner decision, and timestamp. |
| Measurement | Baseline window, measurement window, demand-normalization method, and guardrail status. |
| Evidence | Billing usage, price source, contract-price setting when configured, and source links or exports. |
| Charge | Reconciled savings amount, success-fee rate if used, cap status, and amount charged. |
The Takeaway
Outcome-based pricing is a trust architecture. The invoice should make the customer say: "I understand what we paid for, I can verify it happened, and we only paid when the product delivered the result."