Financial due diligence, TCO, and contract terms

Pricing is structured around employee count, a per-seat model that scales with workforce size. Cost is predictable and budget-able: no surprise usage charges, no per-AI-call fees, and no metered pricing that creates budget risk at high volumes. All platform features, including all 8 AI capabilities, are included in standard pricing; they are not gated add-ons requiring a premium tier upgrade.

There is a 14-day free trial with full feature access and no credit card required. This is not a limited sandbox; it is the full production platform. You can publish real policies to real employees during the trial. By the time you engage in a commercial conversation, you have actual usage data from your own organization to include in the business case. No budget commitment required to start.

Standard implementation is included in the license, with no separate professional services fee for SaaS deployment with standard integrations (AD/SSO, HRMS sync, email gateway). The 24-hour deployment is achievable without external implementation consultants. For complex deployments requiring private AWS account setup or multiple subsidiary configurations, a one-time setup fee may apply, scoped and quoted during pre-sale, not added post-contract. No large implementation fee is a meaningful differentiator versus enterprise software categories where implementation often costs 50–150% of year-one license.

The current approach's TCO is often underestimated because costs are distributed and invisible: SharePoint/intranet licensing allocated to policy management, HR/compliance staff time for manual tracking (40+ hrs/week), IT time maintaining document storage infrastructure, audit remediation costs when non-compliance is found, and opportunity cost of compliance talent doing administrative work. PolicyCentral.ai's year 1 TCO: license fee + zero implementation fee (standard) + 4–8 hours of IT time. The comparison is "license fee vs. all existing hidden costs," and most organizations find hidden costs exceed the license fee.

Year 2 and 3 costs are the license renewal scaled to current employee count. No version upgrade fees (updates are continuous and automatic), no migration costs, no additional training costs (designed for non-technical users), no infrastructure costs (cloud-hosted). AI capabilities improve automatically as Amazon Bedrock's foundation models improve, so your platform gets more capable over time without additional cost.

Fastest lever: admin time savings. Annual cost of compliance/HR staff time currently spent on policy tracking (40 hrs/wk × 50 wks × fully-loaded hourly cost). The 60% reduction represents 24 hrs/week saved. Divide the annual license fee by the annual savings to get payback period in years. For most FSI organizations with even one mid-level compliance manager, the payback period is 3–6 months from admin time savings alone, before accounting for audit risk reduction.

Risk mitigation: 14-day trial before contract to validate the platform with real data before committing. Private AWS deployment option: if the vendor ceases to operate, your instance continues running in your own AWS account until you choose to decommission it. Data portability: all data is exportable at any time; no proprietary lock-in. Vendor stability: 8 years of operation, 70+ live FSI customers including Kotak Mahindra Bank, venture-funded, AWS ISV Partner.

Enterprise contracts are typically annual, with multi-year options available at negotiated rates. Monthly billing is available for organizations preferring OPEX flexibility over annual commitment discounts. Commercial terms include: 99.99% uptime SLA, Data Processing Agreement (DPA), termination clause (notice period, data return obligations), and upgrade pricing framework. All terms are presented transparently in the first commercial conversation.

Yes, and this is the recommended approach for large organizations. A departmental pilot (HR policies for the HR department, or branch circulars for one geography) achieves two objectives: it generates real compliance and engagement data for the business case, and it builds internal familiarity with the admin interface before enterprise-wide rollout. Pilot pricing is available for organizations evaluating at departmental scale before committing to a full deployment.

Renewal pricing terms are agreed at the time of the initial contract, with no surprise price increases at renewal without contractual notice. Multi-year agreements lock in pricing for the contract duration. Employee count changes are handled via a pre-agreed formula rather than arbitrary repricing. Organizations anticipating significant workforce growth can structure a pricing framework that accommodates planned growth without creating annual renegotiation burden.

Private AWS account deployment may have a different pricing structure than SaaS, reflecting the different infrastructure arrangement: your AWS costs are separate from the platform fee. In SaaS, the license fee covers both platform and underlying infrastructure. In private deployment, you pay AWS infrastructure costs directly to AWS and the platform license separately to PolicyCentral.ai. The implementation team provides a full cost structure breakdown for both models during the evaluation phase.