Unclassified

43 — Procurement FAQ

Status: CANONICAL · Commercial OS
Owner: Founder
Last verified: 2026-07-21

Purpose

The buyer's procurement, legal, and finance questions answered once, cleanly — the buyer-facing rendering of 32 Licensing and 30 Pricing. Send proactively at Commit stage; it shortens the last mile more than any discount.

Target audience: Procurement, finance, legal on the buyer side; our sales for reference.

1. Commercial Terms

"How is it priced?" Per named-user seat, per month, billed annually (monthly available +20%). Tiers: Starter $19 · Growth $59 · Command $119 · Enterprise custom (15-seat minimum). A seat = one person + their AI Twin — the Twin is never a separate line item.

"What's a named seat? Can we share logins?" One person's working identity. No shared/concurrent seats — approval attribution and personal Twin scope require identity (a governance feature, not a revenue rule). Reassignment when someone leaves: free, immediate.

"Mid-term seat changes?" Add anytime at contract rate with quarterly true-up (no retroactive penalties). Reduce at renewal; Enterprise agreements can include a ±10% flex band.

"Price protection?" Renewal increases capped at max(7%, CPI) with 60-day notice. Multi-year: year-2 price lock free; 2-year prepay −10%.

"What discounts exist?" Volume (50+ seats −10%, 100+ −15%), design-partner terms (2026 cohort, −50% year 1 with case-study rights), nonprofit/edu −30%. We hold list otherwise — predictable pricing is part of the trust posture.

"Payment terms?" Net-30, annual upfront. Card or invoice/ACH.

2. Evaluation & Onboarding

"Free trial?" Better: a 30-day proof of value — up to 10 seats, full capability, your real tools, three success criteria agreed in writing, decision date attached. No auto-conversion; it ends with a decision, not a surprise invoice.

"Implementation costs? Services?" None. Connectors are OAuth self-serve (minutes each); first value same-day; onboarding is included (45). No implementation partner required — total cost is the subscription (29 §3 TCO box).

"Training?" The user surface is four controls (Store in Spine, Ask/Assign/Approve Twin). One enablement session included; materials provided.

3. Legal & Risk

"Whose paper?" Ours by default (Order Form + MSA + DPA; Enterprise adds SLA + Security Addendum). Customer paper considered at 100+ seats with our non-negotiables preserved.

"Who owns the data?" You do — including derived Spine content. Our processing license is service-provision only. No training of foundation models on your data. No cross-tenant use. On exit: export anytime (open formats), 60-day retrieval, certified deletion.

"Liability?" Capped at 12 months of fees, with standard carve-outs (confidentiality, data-protection breach, IP indemnity). IP indemnification included.

"SLA?" Enterprise: 99.9% with service credits. Other tiers: published status page, best-efforts. We do not contract SLAs we haven't measured — you'll find we under-promise deliberately.

"Insurance?" Standard commercial stack appropriate to stage (details in security packet); certificates on request.

"Vendor lock-in?" Structurally minimized: your tools of record keep operating (we assemble, not migrate); Spine exports open-format anytime; AI providers are swappable by configuration. Our retention strategy is compounding value, not exit friction — it's in the contract (32 §2).

4. Company Diligence (the startup questions, answered straight)

"You're early — why should we depend on you?" Three structural mitigations before any promises: (1) your systems of record are untouched — worst case you lose a layer, not your operations; (2) your Spine exports — your assembled truth leaves with you; (3) design-partner terms compensate the risk with pricing and roadmap influence. And one promise: honest status, always — see our certification table with dates, not adjectives (42 §3).

"References?" Design-partner references as the cohort matures; until then we offer the deeper substitute: a POV on your own accounts. Evidence in your tenant beats testimony from someone else's.

"Roadmap commitments?" Directional roadmap shared under NDA (69); contractual commitments only for scoped Enterprise items with dates we control.

5. Procurement Checklist (what we send at Commit — one email)

□ This FAQ · □ Security packet (42) · □ Draft Order Form + MSA + DPA · □ W-9/vendor forms · □ Proposal with ROI (their numbers) · □ POV results summary · □ Single named contact (founder) with < 24h response commitment.

KPIs: Commit → signature ≤ 3 weeks; procurement-question rounds ≤ 2 (proactive packet working); redline frequency tracked into 32 §3 quarterly review.