02How you pay
How you pay: nothing up front, then a share of the profit the automation creates
No fee to start, no retainer while we build, no hourly rate running in the background. The fee comes later, as a share of the extra profit the automation creates, measured against a baseline your own finance people agree with us before anything is built. This page is the full mechanics behind [the AI Praxis puts into your business](/ai): what counts as gain, how the starting point gets fixed, how it gets checked afterwards, and what happens if it turns out to make nothing at all.
01
Nothing up front
There is no invoice for the call, the diagnostic or the build. No retainer holds a slot on the team's calendar. No hourly rate runs while we work. Until there is a measured gain, no fee arrives.
What that does mean: the earliest thing this costs you is your own time and the access we need to see how the work actually happens. What it does not mean: that building the thing costs nothing, or that this is a favor. It is a bet Praxis is making with its own time, on the belief the gain will be real and measurable. If it turns out not to be, that is a cost we absorb, not you.
The fee is a share of the measured gain. If there is no measured gain, there is no share.
02
What incremental means
Incremental means new profit measured against the old way of doing the same work, not the whole of what the business earns. The question is always the same: what changed here that would not have happened otherwise.
Some of that new profit is money saved: fewer hours paid for the same output, fewer mistakes redone, fewer late charges paid because something sat too long. Some of it is money that was already available and was being dropped: a lead that went unanswered on a Saturday, a renewal nobody chased, a request that quietly went to a competitor because no one replied in time. Both count the same way against the baseline.
For a rough sense of the hours involved in your own business, the calculator does that arithmetic in front of you. The published ranges behind it, and why most of the figures circulating online do not hold up to checking, are catalogued on where every number comes from.
03
How the baseline is agreed
This is the part most people want spelled out in full, so here it is.
Before anything is built, the business and Praxis agree a baseline in writing. It is usually built from three measures: what the work costs today, how long it takes today, and how much of it actually gets finished today. Your finance people choose which fits the work being automated. Neither of us picks the measure that flatters the eventual result, because it is fixed before either of us knows what the after number will look like.
Every measure comes from records the business already keeps: time sheets, ticket systems, invoicing software, not a new system built to manufacture a favorable starting point. Once agreed, the measure and its source are written into the same document that sets out the fee, and they do not move after that. That document is signed by whoever owns the finance function, usually a controller, a finance lead or the owner, and by Praxis. After the build, the identical measure is read again from the identical source, by the identical process.
If a business does not already keep the records a given measure would need, the honest answer is that a baseline for that work cannot be reconstructed from history that was never recorded. Tracking then starts from an agreed date before the build begins, and the baseline is whatever that new, simple tracking shows over an agreed period, not a number either of us guesses at. It is slower, and it is the only version of this we consider honest.
Finance is usually the clearest place to see this working end to end, because the records already exist for reasons unconnected to us. How this plays out inside a finance team is written up separately.
04
How it is measured afterwards
The same measure, from the same source, is read again on a cadence set out in the same written agreement that fixed the baseline, not decided later by whoever finds it convenient. Whoever read the baseline reads it again: usually the business's own finance function, sometimes a bookkeeper or accountant the business already uses for other work. Praxis does not read its own number. A measure we both propose and grade is not a measure, it is an opinion, and this arrangement does not run on our opinion of our own work.
If a disagreement comes up about what the after number shows, it gets resolved by returning to the written definition agreed at the baseline, not by negotiation between the two of us. Whoever reads the records reads them the same way both times, independent of anyone with a stake in the answer. A measure that can be argued with after the fact was defined too loosely at the start, which is why that work happens before the build, not after it.
The full process this measurement sits inside, from the free call through to handover, is set out on how a build actually runs.
05
A worked example, labelled hypothetical
This is hypothetical. It is an imagined business, built only to show how the arithmetic works, not a company that exists or a client Praxis has worked with.
Picture a company that handles inbound service requests by phone and email. Before anything is built, its finance function counts a normal week and writes down the baseline: four people spend a combined 100 hours a week on these requests, most of it spent chasing status rather than resolving anything.
After the build, the identical measure is read again, from the identical records, by the identical finance function. This time the combined hours on the same work come to 40 hours a week.
The arithmetic: 100 hours minus 40 hours leaves 60 hours a week no longer spent on that work. That is the incremental gain, in hours, measured against the baseline and nothing else. What those freed hours turn out to be worth in money earned or money saved is a question for the business's own finance function to answer in its own figures, not ours. The Praxis fee is a share of that measured gain, set out in the same written agreement as the baseline: never a percentage printed on this page and never a figure we choose for you.
06
What happens if it produces nothing
If the after measurement shows no gain against the baseline, using the same measure and the same source both times, there is no fee for that piece of work. The fee is a share of the measured gain. If there is no measured gain, there is no share.
That does not mean nothing happened. Whatever was built stays with the business: the automation itself, the documentation, the training given to the people who use it, and the written record of what was tried and what the measurement showed. None of that is taken back because the number came in flat.
We stop when the agreed measurement shows nothing to share, not on a date we pick because the project is taking longer than we hoped. If the honest reading says the work did not move, we say so, and we do not keep billing for a gain that is not there.
07
How long the share runs
The share runs for a term set out in the same written agreement that fixes the baseline: not an open-ended claim on the business forever, and not a number quoted on a web page. Some agreements end on a fixed date chosen when the agreement is signed. Others end when an agreed condition is met, such as the system running unattended and stable for an agreed stretch, or a set number of measurement readings having been taken. Whichever mechanism is chosen, it is written down before the build starts and it does not get renegotiated once work is underway.
What never happens is a share that runs indefinitely by default, or an end date left for Praxis to decide later on its own. The term is a term: written, agreed, and fixed at the start.
08
What the industry calls it
This kind of arrangement has names in the industry: gainshare, outcome-based pricing, a share of savings. They describe the same idea from slightly different angles, and none of them is unique to what Praxis does.
A retainer pays for time held open, whether or not that time produces anything measurable. A fixed fee pays one agreed amount for a defined piece of work, whether the result turns out to matter or barely register. What we run instead ties payment to a gain measured after the fact, against a baseline both sides agreed before the work started. It is slower to get paid this way, and it is the only version that puts the measurement ahead of the invoice.
09
What you spend regardless
None of this is free in the sense that it costs you nothing. The fee is contingent, but your time is not, and neither is what the automation asks of the business around it.
You spend your own time on the call and the diagnostic, and your finance people spend time agreeing the measure and signing the baseline. We need real access: to the systems, the records, and the people doing the work, not a summary written up for us. Someone has to pay attention while the automation runs beside the old way, because a system nobody watches does not get trusted or fixed when it is wrong. And there is internal change involved almost every time, because a process that has run one way for years does not absorb a new step on its own. None of that shows up on an invoice, and all of it is real.
Questions
What should you know before the first call?
- How is this different from paying a consultant a fixed fee or a retainer?
- A fixed fee is paid for defined work regardless of what that work does afterwards, and a retainer is paid for time held open regardless of output. This is paid from a share of profit measured against an agreed baseline, so nothing is owed until a gain is actually measured.
- Who decides what counts as the baseline measurement?
- The business's own finance people choose the measure, drawn from records the business already keeps, and it is fixed in writing before any building starts so neither side can change it once the after number is known.
- What happens if the business has never tracked the numbers a baseline would need?
- Tracking starts from an agreed date before the build begins, and the baseline is whatever that new, simple record shows over an agreed period. A starting number is never invented from history that was never recorded.
- What if the automation gets built and it does not actually save time or make money?
- Then there is no fee for that piece of work. The fee is a share of the measured gain, so if the same measure taken the same way afterwards shows no gain, there is nothing to share, and whatever was built still stays with you.
- How long does the profit share arrangement last?
- It runs for a term set out in writing at the start, ending on an agreed date or an agreed condition rather than continuing indefinitely or being left for Praxis to decide once work is already underway.
- If there is no fee up front, what does the business actually have to give to make this work?
- Time from you and your finance people, real access to your systems and the people doing the work, and attention while the automation runs beside the old way. None of that is billed, and all of it is genuinely needed for the arrangement to work.
Where this leads
This page is one part of the whole offer: the AI Praxis puts into your business.
Ask what your baseline would look like
The fastest way to find out what this could be worth in your business is the free call. Bring what the work costs today, however roughly you know it, and we will tell you what a baseline for it could look like and what we would build first.
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