--- title: "Pricing: the commercial model, and why there are no figures on it" canonical_url: "https://tokenobserve.com/pricing" published: 2026-09-02 last_updated: 2026-10-15 --- # Pricing: the commercial model, and why there are no figures on it ## The model Connect a supported billing source and review its reported costs, currencies and collection status. Provider model calls, model-assisted search and Google BigQuery scans can incur separate charges on your own accounts. ## Why no price is published Paid cloud pricing is not published. The free trial ends without an automatic upgrade. Discuss customer-hosted licensing, support or professional services against a written scope before agreeing a quote. ## Facts - Priced on: Deployments and simultaneously active registered agents, stated on the Order Form - Never metered: Your providers bill model calls directly. Cloud traffic quotas are access limits, not a published paid price - Free trial: Thirty days from cloud workspace creation. No card or automatic paid conversion - What you can buy today: The free cloud pilot, with customer-hosted arrangements scoped separately ## What is being bought, line by line ### Free 30-day cloud trial Price: £0 trial fee Unit: thirty days from workspace creation, with no card or automatic paid conversion Who it is for: The IT team connecting a supported provider billing source and evaluating optional agent governance. Create an account, confirm email and create a hosted workspace. Connect provider-reported billing with the required reporting credential. Agent activity requires a separate inference key, a registered agent and supported client configuration. Included: - A hosted workspace; no Token Observe server installation - Billing adapters for OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, xAI Grok and Google Cloud Billing - Source periods, currencies, collection freshness and partial/failure status - Governance and activity for requests routed through the workspace Not included: - Provider model calls, model-assisted search and Google BigQuery charges - Historical prompts, browser conversations and all subscription-plan bills - An availability SLA, independent penetration test or production-critical assurance - Unlimited admission, storage, running workspaces or traffic ### Self-hosted deployment subscription Price: On application. No figure is published. Unit: per deployment, per term, with a ceiling on simultaneously active agents Who it is for: The head of IT who owns the AI line on the card statement, and the team who would run the deployment. License one customer-hosted installation with an agreed ceiling on active agents. Commercial capacity checks apply when configuration changes; they do not stop already governed traffic. Review the complete licence and operating requirements before signing. Included: - One deployment on your own infrastructure. Air-gapped is granted - Source access: read, compile, modify, own your separable modifications - A reasonable number of non-production copies, counting towards no limit - Updates during the term, on a pre-1.0 policy: the latest published minor only - Every governance control, in every tier. A licence scales capacity, never enforcement Not included: - Model spend. Your keys, your provider’s invoice, no margin taken - Your infrastructure: hosts, network, TLS, secrets, DNS, disk, backups - Model behaviour and provider incidents. Configuring failover is covered - Your agents’ own code. Reading a trace with you is covered - Any availability or performance commitment (section 8.2) ### Design-partner agreement Price: On application. No figure is published. Unit: stated on one design-partner Order Form, with the term and the scope Who it is for: An organisation that wants a named engineer and real influence over the roadmap, and accepts a pre-1.0 product’s risks in writing. Work directly with a named engineer and help shape the roadmap. The agreement asks for regular feedback, redacted diagnostics when you raise an issue, and access to any penetration test you commission. Publication rights remain as set out in the licence; there is no support desk or service-credit schedule. Included: - A named engineer, reachable directly, who has read your deployment - The response targets below, written into the agreement rather than a web page - Direct influence on the roadmap, with your blocking issues prioritised explicitly - Early access to fixes on a branch, and full sight of the defect list Not included: - Service credits. There is no availability SLA to credit against - Cover outside 09:00–17:30 Europe/London, Monday to Friday, or on English public holidays - Known issues already published, and defects arising from your own modifications - For customer hosting, data recovery: there is no vendor-side copy of your database ### Policy and control-framework engagement Price: On application. No figure is published. Unit: quoted per engagement, against a written scope Who it is for: A team commissioning policy authoring or control-framework mapping. Commission policy authoring and framework mapping against an agreed written scope. Policy design guidance and template review remain part of support; separate authoring or compliance-function work is quoted as professional services. Included: - Authoring your policy set, with the shadow-mode backtest a named person can be required to acknowledge before enforcement - Mapping it onto your control framework, and onto the EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001, NIST AI RMF and OWASP Not included: - Compliance approval or sign-off of your DPIA, FRIA, ROPA or risk register - Certification or an independent attestation - Investigation or remediation of agents found by the radar ## What moves a price - Deployments: One installation you control, plus the non-production copies the licence permits. A second line means a second production install. - Simultaneously active agents: Counted in the active state only, and enforced on control-plane writes, never on the request path, where a refusal would take a fleet down for a commercial reason. - Entitled evidence modules: Three, and only three: pull connectors holding a narrow read-scoped vendor credential you supply, push receivers for your own exporter or SIEM, and seat governance. Nothing that enforces is on the list. - Subscription seats: A second ceiling, for managed developer devices. The surface is preview and reports a technical blocker, so ask what it does today. - Subscription term: A hard wall in one direction: additions are refused and named, nothing already running is touched. A lapse refuses growth rather than causing an outage. - The support relationship: A design-partner agreement is a different commitment from a licence with no support attached, and is priced as one. - Work that is not support: Authoring or mapping a policy set. So is any certification milestone procurement requires: committable with a named date, and that date has a cost. ## The support model These are proposed customer-hosted design-partner support terms, not a support commitment for the free cloud trial. They are first-response targets, never resolution times. You propose the severity, the higher one applies while it is disputed, and a signed agreement takes precedence. ### S1: Critical What it means: Production agent traffic is stopped, or a control has failed in a way that lets ungoverned or unrecorded traffic through, with no workaround. This includes a deployment that serves traffic but has stopped recording it. Target: First response within 2 business hours, an update every 4, a same-day workaround where one exists, and a patch as soon as a fix is validated. No date is promised before diagnosis. ### S2: High What it means: A major function is broken or materially degraded in production, but a workaround exists. Target: First response within 1 business day, daily updates, a workaround targeted within 5 business days, and a fix in the next release. ### S3: Medium What it means: A function is broken or incorrect with a straightforward workaround, or the impact is confined to non-production. Target: First response within 3 business days, weekly updates, and a fix in the next release or a place in the backlog with the reason given. ### S4: Low What it means: A question, a documentation issue, a cosmetic defect or a feature request. Target: First response within 5 business days, then the backlog, with no commitment attached. ### There is no availability service level There is no availability SLA, no uptime percentage and no service credits. The cloud pilot has one replica, shared resource and traffic quotas, and no completed live customer capacity or recovery qualification. For customer-hosted installations, three additional limits explain this position. First, Tenhaw does not operate your deployment: you control the host, the network, the TLS terminator, the disk and the restart policy, and an uptime number from a party with access to none of those, receiving no telemetry from them, would be unmeasurable by either side. Second, no retained partner-shaped sustained-load result exists. A bounded mixed-journey soak harness exercises allow, block, approval and read paths, and the older laboratory throughput probe establishes an order of magnitude for a loopback mock-provider path, but the evidence a commitment would need is a retained multi-hour run against your corpus, your concurrency, your policies and your provider latency, with an agreed degradation curve. Third, recovery automation exists while partner RPO and RTO proof does not: the release workflow boots the packaged image, takes and restores a live backup and checks the restored chain against externally retained values, and recovery is SQLite full-snapshot restore rather than point-in-time recovery, with backup scheduling, off-box placement, retention and freshness alerting all operator-owned. Two consequences matter to anyone assessing this risk: Token Observe is deliberately in the request path and fails closed, so if it is down, governed agents cannot call models and it is a single-writer process on one node by design at this scale, with no replica, no clustering and no high-availability story. An availability or performance commitment becomes possible once the partner-shaped load and recovery results are retained and approved. Until then no number is offered, because nobody could stand behind one. Ask for the date; it is a fair thing to put in an agreement. ## The evaluation The hosted trial lasts thirty days from workspace creation, with no card or automatic paid conversion. - Open the account form, confirm your email using its link, then sign in and create a workspace. No ZIP, Node.js, Docker or local Token Observe server is required. - Connect OpenAI organization costs with an Admin API key; Anthropic organization costs with its Admin API key; xAI team API usage with a management key and team ID; or a configured Google Cloud Billing BigQuery export with its required reporting access. These sources do not cover every subscription or plan. - The report covers the last 30 complete UTC days and preserves currency, source periods and collection status. A completed collection does not mean the provider's bill is final. Missing or failed evidence is unknown, not zero. - Billing credentials are separate from inference keys. Model calls and model-assisted search use your separate inference account and can incur provider charges. Google BigQuery scans can also incur charges; saving an inference key does not make a model call. - At trial expiry, workspace changes, model calls, scheduled billing collection and paid-capable natural-language trace searches stop. Authorized retained GET reads, exports and exact first-party MCP reporting reads remain subject to the shared monthly traffic quota. - The small pilot has shared admission, process, storage and traffic limits. Reaching the traffic quota pauses portal and gateway access until an operator raises it or the UTC month renews; retained data is not erased by that quota. - Cloud hosting holds workspace evidence and supplied credentials on the service. Workspace processes have separate directories and databases but share one OS user and host; this is not a sandbox or VM security boundary. - There is no availability SLA or independent penetration test. Keep production-critical workloads outside this pilot. Customer-hosted installations have separate licence and operating terms. ## Questions and answers Q: What does the cloud trial cost? A: The Token Observe cloud trial is free for 30 days from workspace creation, with no card and no automatic paid conversion. Paid cloud pricing is not published. Model calls, model-assisted search and Google BigQuery scans can incur charges with your providers. Customer-hosted licences and assisted work are quoted separately against a written scope. Q: What happens when the cloud trial ends? A: Workspace changes, model calls, scheduled billing collection and paid-capable natural-language trace searches stop. Authorized retained GET reads and exports remain subject to the shared traffic quota. Exact first-party MCP reporting reads can continue with an active and currently authorized workspace key; unknown or upstream tools, batches and mutations remain refused. Nothing automatically converts to a paid subscription. Q: Does connecting billing also show historical conversations? A: No. Billing APIs provide cost records, not historical prompts, answers, browser conversations or hidden chain of thought. Activity requires requests routed through the workspace gateway or another supported evidence source you explicitly configure. Missing telemetry is unknown coverage, not zero use. Q: Which provider credentials do we need? A: OpenAI and Anthropic billing connections require their organization Admin API keys. xAI needs a separate management key and team ID. Google needs a configured Cloud Billing BigQuery export and the required reporting permissions. Model inference uses a separate key, while gateway and MCP clients use workspace-issued agent or seat keys. The portal rejects a stored billing secret reused for inference. Q: Can we still host Token Observe ourselves? A: Yes, customer hosting remains available through assisted setup. The commercial source-available licence covers deployments, simultaneously active agents, optional support and separate professional services. It remains a template pending counsel. Customer-hosted data custody, recovery and licence-expiry behavior are separate from the hosted trial. Q: Is there an uptime SLA? A: No availability SLA, uptime percentage or service credits are offered for the cloud pilot. It runs as one replica with shared resource and traffic limits. Customer-hosted design-partner support can state first-response targets in a signed agreement; those response targets do not establish service availability or cloud-trial support. Q: Can our security team test it before buying? A: The software licence expressly permits inspection, fuzzing, penetration-testing and reverse-engineering of a deployment you control, including commissioned tests. Those permissions do not authorize testing the shared cloud service. Coordinate cloud security questions with the published security contact. Token Observe has no independent penetration test or SOC 2, ISO 27001 or ISO 42001 certification. Q: What must we agree before customer hosting? A: Agree the deployment scope, active-agent capacity, support and fees in a signed agreement. The published licence remains a draft requiring counsel approval, completion of its placeholders and a liability-cap check against insurance cover. It states intended terms; your signed agreement governs.