Economics v0.2

Charles Dana · Monce AI · April 2026

The Equation

Cost(PO) = CVLM + CSnake + CPricing + Cinfra

For the current Bedrock on-demand pricing (eu-west-3, Apr 2026):

ComponentCallTokens (typ.)$/PO
Stage 0 (Client ID)Haiku 4.5 × 11k in / 0.1k out$0.0013
Stage 1 (Doc Analyzer)Haiku 4.5 × 12k in / 0.3k out$0.0031
Stage 2 (Extractor)Sonnet 4.6 × 1–24k in / 2k out$0.042
Stage 3 (Rules)local$0
Stage 4 (Snake)local$0
Stage 4.5 (Pricing)local$0
Stage 5 (Validation)Haiku 4.5 × 13k in / 0.5k out$0.0044
Stage 6 (Router)local$0
Total LLM$0.051

A typical single-page ALMA PO with 6 line items costs $0.05 in LLM fees. Multi-page POs (e.g. 13 line items over 2 pages) scale roughly linearly and stay < $0.10.

Pricing-stage leverage

Stage 4.5 is free (< 50 μs of local lookup) but it closes the pricing gap that would otherwise push the PO to a human reviewer. The leverage is not in the stage's cost, it is in its effect on routing:

Before 4.5After 4.5
Avg unit_price coverage~35% of lines~85% of lines on seen families
Avg trust score (naked-price POs)40–6080–95
Share routed to auto-approve< 20%~70% target
Average human time per PO~4 min~30 s (spot check)

Break-even vs manual entry

Assume an internal cost of €30/h for Isabel's time. Manual PO entry averages ~4 min → €2.00 per PO. The pipeline runs at $0.05 ≈ €0.046.

Saving per auto-approved PO ≈ €1.95

At 50 POs/day, that's €98/day in recovered Isabel-time, or ~€24k/year gross, before the fixed infrastructure cost.

Fixed infrastructure

ResourceMonthly
EC2 t3.medium (eu-west-3)$30
EBS 20 GB gp3$2
Route53 + CloudWatch + data out$4
Total$36/month

Volume scaling

 10 POs/day  → $15/mo LLM + $36 infra = $51/mo  (€48)
 50 POs/day  → $77/mo LLM + $36 infra = $113/mo (€106)
200 POs/day  → $306/mo LLM + $36 infra = $342/mo (€320)

t3.medium handles 3 concurrent workers — ~20 POs/minute sustained on a 6-line single-page average. The bottleneck is Bedrock throughput, not CPU.

Depth knob

The model_mode parameter on /extract trades cost for accuracy:

modestage 0/1/5stage 2$/PO
cheapHaikuHaiku$0.01
balanced (default)HaikuSonnet$0.05
accurateSonnetSonnet$0.12
VLM-dollars = accuracy-dollars

Cheapest first. Escalate only when Stage 4.5's tariff lookup doesn't clear the bar.