Pricing
Pricing has three parts and one design principle behind all of them: you pay for use, your worst case is always one known number, and neither people nor tools are ever the meter. This is a concierge platform — the numbers are set in your agreement, and the structure below is the whole structure.
Part 1
One annual agreement is the foundation, priced to your institution's scale — never to how many tools you run: the security and compliance posture, hosting and operations for everything you run — patching, upgrades, monitoring, the 2am problems — and unlimited live tools. Running a tool costs us almost nothing, so there are no slots and no tiers: no purchasing conversation stands between a department and its tool. The tool catalog is included and grows every year you're a customer. And it covers unlimited people — we never charge per seat, because the fastest way to kill an internal platform is to make every new user a purchasing decision.
Part 2
Usage bills by monthly active people — distinct people who actually signed in that month, counted once across everything you run. Someone who uses fifteen of your tools is one active user, not fifteen. Your institution carries one negotiated Max Fee, so your worst case is a single number known in advance — and because people are counted once, rolling out another tool to people already on the platform costs nothing extra. An unused tool costs nothing, and pilot-only activity never bills: you don't pay until it's rolled out.
Part 3
Changing a tool or adding one is Brightrail's work, and it's part of the agreement: no build credits, no metered AI capacity, no invoice for a change request. Mining your SOPs into rules is ordinary building too. What stops sprawl isn't a meter — every tool and every change goes through your institution's recorded decisions and Brightrail's build queue, so your portfolio grows exactly as fast as your people deliberately grow it.
You pay: (active people × your per-user rate), or your institution's Max Fee — whichever is smaller.
The whole usage model is that one line — one rate, one cap, both in your order form. Per-tool numbers exist for your own adoption and cost-center reporting — never as a second bill.
A monthly invoice, numbered and visible to your admins in the platform itself: one billed line computed on the deduplicated count with your Max Fee applied and marked when the cap did the work — and beneath it, one line per tool with its department and its active people, as your adoption breakdown. Your CFO sees exactly which department's tools drive use — and because tools aren't metered, adding one never triggers a purchasing decision. The platform still flags idle tools and offers one-click, reversible archiving: portfolio hygiene, not a bill.
Your Max Fee plus your platform agreement — two numbers you can read off your order form on day one and budget annually. There is no uncapped exposure anywhere in the model, and no tier you can accidentally outgrow.
They cost nothing — no usage fees, no slot, no anything. The platform tells you they're idle and offers reversible archiving, purely as portfolio hygiene. Paying for shelfware is structurally impossible here.
A pilot: one department, one tool — typically a policy-compliance tracker built from that department's own SOPs. Pilot-priced; if it doesn't earn the platform conversation, it retires cleanly and you keep the code.
You take your data — every record and your complete decision logs — cleanly exported in open formats, with an escrow or exit-license arrangement available for continuity. We keep customers by being worth keeping, not by holding anything hostage.