THE CONTROL LOOP
Know what each valuable AI outcome costs before the next budget surprise.
Limitls turns fragmented bills, traces, and workflow data into a usable cost-per-outcome baseline. Then we activate one approved control in production, or prove it in a controlled environment, and test one optimization with your team.
Fixed proposal after scoping
Starting fees are in USD and apply to the agreed assessment scope. Final scope and fees are confirmed before kickoff. Additional business units, systems, jurisdictions, and implementation work are scoped separately. Fees exclude applicable taxes.
AI spend is visible. The economics are not.
Finance
Tracks invoices, committed spend, and budgets.
Engineering
Tracks models, tokens, tool calls, retries, and runtime.
Product
Tracks adoption, quality, and business outcomes.
The shared decision unit: cost per accepted outcome.
Without it, leadership cannot reliably explain:
- Which workflow or customer consumed the spend
- How retries, retrieval, tool calls, and agent steps multiplied it
- The cost of human review and failure recovery
- Whether a lower-cost model still meets the accepted quality threshold
- Unit economics at the next volume level
- Which control can safely change the cost curve
Develop a decision-grade unit-cost view and validate a control to manage escalating costs.
The sprint defines an accepted business outcome, reconciles the relevant cost stack with stated coverage and confidence, and tests a change under consistent quality requirements. The result is a decision-making system, not just another spend report.
- BeforeCost per token.
- AfterCost per accepted outcome and cost to serve.
- BeforeA single provider invoice.
- AfterA decision-relevant view of model, platform, tool, retrieval, human, and failure costs, with coverage stated.
- BeforeBudget surprises.
- AfterThresholds, owners, alerts, and agreed fail-open, fail-closed, or fallback behaviors.
- BeforeOptimization based on intuition.
- AfterEvidence-based comparison of baseline and changes, measured against the agreed quality threshold.
How the unit is built
Inputs
- Attempts
- Retries
- Tool Calls
- Retrieval
- Human Review
- Failure Recovery
The cost stack
Model, platform, tool, retrieval, human, and failure costs
Accepted quality
The agreed quality threshold
The decision
Cost per accepted outcome and cost to serve.
What you receive
- Transparent workload economics model;
- Baseline and sensitivity ranges;
- Cost-driver and attribution view;
- Outcome/quality measurement specification;
- Activated production guardrail or controlled-environment evidence with a release-ready control;
- Measured optimization result;
- 90-day control backlog and executive decision view.
How the first sprint works
Days 1–5: Define the unit.
Agree the workflow, attempt, accepted outcome, quality floor, baseline, and accessible data.
Week 2: Reconcile the stack.
Attribute the material variable and fixed costs and expose the drivers.
Weeks 3–4: Control and prove.
Activate one approved guardrail or prove it in a controlled environment, run one experiment, and present the next decision.
Returns to the baseline and quality threshold
Tool-neutral by design
Limitls may work with existing gateways, cloud controls, observability, metering, and product analytics. The client is not forced onto a Limitls-owned platform. Tool selection considers deployment model, data residency, open standards, security, software-supply-chain provenance, release integrity, incident history, operational ownership, commercial terms, and roadmap risk.
Delivery gates
Four decision points keep the engagement controlled from kickoff through handover. The Day 5 review is the second gate. Later approvals occur when their required evidence is ready, not on a universal calendar date. Completion and commercial terms are defined in the proposal.
- Before counted delivery begins
Access-ready kickoff
Confirm the sponsor, decision owner, scope, agreed inputs, legal and access authorization, stakeholder availability, and acceptance criteria. Record any missing prerequisites before counted delivery begins.
- Fifth project business day after the agreed kickoff
Scope and feasibility gate
Confirm or adjust the boundary, accessible evidence, main constraint, feasible outcome, and remaining risks. Record the decision to proceed, rescope, pause, or stop.
- During delivery, when the required evidence is ready
Service-specific approval gates
Apply any technical, security, regulatory, business acceptance, or release approvals required by the agreed scope. Each approval occurs when its required evidence is ready, not on a universal date.
- At the end of the scoped engagement
Completion and continuation gate
Accept the contracted outcome, record remaining decisions and risks, and decide whether to close, operate, extend, remediate, launch, or scale through a separately agreed next scope.
Fit
Best fit
Organizations with meaningful production or late-stage AI usage, multiple models/providers, agent loops, visible spend variance or a budget/scale decision that cannot be resolved from invoices alone.
Not a fit
A buyer with no defined workflow or accessible usage data; a request for a token-price comparison only; or a demand for guaranteed savings without an agreed quality and outcome baseline.
FAQ
Bring the invoice and one important workflow.
We will determine if the economics are measurable, identify which control is worth testing, and assess whether the sprint is warranted.