Every AI platform has a cost of goods: the tokens it buys from model providers on your behalf. The pricing question is what happens between that cost and your invoice. Most vendors answer with a hand-wave — “credits,” “compute units,” tiers engineered so you can't reconstruct the underlying number. We think that hand-wave tells you something: if a platform won't put its markup on the invoice, you're not buying software — you're buying margin. Hidden margin, priced at whatever the demo convinced you to pay.
The anatomy of a Mayaa bill
Three line items, no fog:
- Base subscription. A flat monthly fee for the platform — the agents, the approval system, the briefings, the experiment machinery. Posted on the pricing page, same for everyone on a plan.
- Included AI usage, shown as provider cost × markup. Your plan includes an AI-usage budget, and the invoice shows both factors: what we paid the model providers and the multiplier we charge on it (2.0× on Starter, stepping down to 1.3× on Scale). The multiplier is our margin, in writing.
- Overage at the same rate. A busy month costs the same multiplier as an idle one. No punitive second tier, no “contact sales” cliff. If we won't gouge you at the margin, we have to earn the volume.
And the thing that's deliberately not on the bill: your ad spend. Meta, Google, and LinkedIn bill your card directly, from your accounts. A vendor who routes ad budget through their books has acquired both a float and a temptation; we'd rather have neither.
The one number worth negotiating
Since the base fee is posted and provider costs are what they are, the only true lever in any cost-plus arrangement is the multiplier — and the only honest way it moves is with commitment: higher volume, longer terms, lower markup. That's the negotiation we'll happily have, because it's symmetric: you can audit every input. Compare that with negotiating against “credits,” where the counterparty controls the exchange rate and the meter.
Use this as a procurement test beyond us: ask any AI vendor to show provider cost and markup as separate numbers on the invoice. The ones who will are selling software. The ones who won't are selling the gap.
Why we wrote this down
Partly conviction, partly incentive design: posting the markup forces us to win on what the agents actually produce — the campaigns shipped, the experiments run, the briefing on your screen each morning — rather than on pricing opacity. It's the same reason our agents launch campaigns with holdout groups: we'd rather be measured than believed.
Want this run for you? The team that wrote these posts is the team that does the work.
Start free trial
