We Stopped Charging a Percentage of Your Savings

CLARITY used to charge a performance fee: a share of the savings we verified you had realized, in any month your cloud spend went above a threshold, on Enterprise agreements, added to the subscription rather than replacing it.

On 7 September 2026 we withdrew it. Your invoice is one line now — the price of your plan — and no tier carries any charge tied to what you save, at any level of spend.

The change

It is worth being clear that it was not broken. It was drafted for counsel, specified down to the eligibility test and the monthly caps, implemented end to end, and it worked. Withdrawing it was a commercial decision and not a bug fix, and the reasoning is the only interesting part, so here it is.

Recommend and act are different products, and the category already prices them differently

This is the argument that decided it.

ProsperOps, Zesty and Spot.io Eco take a share of the savings they produce, and they are entitled to. They execute the change on your infrastructure — buying and selling commitments, moving workloads onto spot capacity, autonomously, while you are asleep. The saving happens because their software did something. A share of it is a fair claim.

CLARITY identifies the saving. Somebody on your team then decides whether to act on it, schedules the change, and carries the risk of making it. Our credentials are read-only; we do not touch your accounts. Taking a commission on a change your engineers designed and executed is a much weaker claim, and a good procurement lead makes exactly that argument at renewal. We did not have a satisfying answer.

The clearest evidence that this line is real is that Vantage prices its own products on either side of it: a flat subscription for the visibility platform, and a share of savings for Autopilot, which acts. Same company, two models, split exactly where the software starts doing the work. We are on the subscription side of that line, and pretending otherwise was going to get harder, not easier.

It put our revenue on a number we compute and nobody audits

The second reason is about what the product is for.

Every performance fee is an assertion: we saved you $X. We calculate X. You can dispute it, but you are disputing our arithmetic against our evidence, and the tie-break is us. In a platform whose entire proposition is that its numbers are trustworthy, an invoice line the customer might reasonably contest attacks the proposition itself.

We have written at length about places where this product overstated a saving by accident — a rounding quantum treated as ground truth, six switched-off virtual machines modelled at full price, an allocation model producing more than the service was billed. Those get found and fixed because nothing depends on them being generous. Attach revenue to that number and you have created a permanent, quiet pressure in one direction. Not fraud — something subtler and worse, because nobody would ever notice themselves doing it.

Our smallest plan could never have paid it

The third reason is simply that the design did not hold together, and we would rather say so than let someone else notice.

Our Starter plan covers up to $50,000 a month of tracked cloud spend. The fee applied only above a monthly cloud spend twice that size. A Starter customer could not arithmetically reach the threshold of a charge our own agreement described as a property of the agreement rather than of the plan. It was sold to a plan that could never trigger it.

That is not a rounding error in the terms. It is two numbers written by the same people at different times, never held up against each other, and it survived a legal draft and a public pricing page.

The part that makes this less brave than it sounds

Here is the fact a more flattering version of this post would leave out: it had never become a revenue line.

The verification pipeline that turns "a resource stopped costing money" into "a saving we can stand behind" only shipped recently, and the automatic detector behind it is still switched off by default, because we were not yet satisfied it could tell a real remediation from ordinary billing noise. So the charge had been specified, built, published and enforced for months while collecting nothing.

That made this decision cheap. We gave up expected revenue, not collected revenue. We would like to claim we would have made the same call with a material number attached, and we believe we would have, but we did not have to find out, and it would be dishonest to accept credit for a test we were never given.

What replaces it

Nothing, and that is deliberate.

Our plans already price by scale: each one covers a ceiling of tracked cloud spend, so a larger customer already pays more. The performance fee was a second value-capture mechanism bolted onto a ladder that was already doing that job.

One term did have to change alongside it, and it is worth stating because it protects you rather than us. Pricing by tracked spend carries the opposite perverse incentive: optimise a customer from $1.1M to $900K of monthly spend and they fall a plan, and we get paid less for having done the job well. So your plan is now fixed at signing and reviewed only at renewal. Growing does not reprice you mid-term; shrinking does not reprice us.

What happens to the savings numbers

We keep measuring them. The savings ledger, the verification against provider billing, the ROI report — all of it stays, and none of it is connected to an invoice any more.

Its job is now to answer one question at renewal: what did this subscription actually buy? That question deserves evidence traceable to your provider's own billing data, which is what the ledger holds. What changed is that the evidence is no longer also a meter, and we no longer have a reason to prefer a larger number over a correct one.

Three practical consequences, if you are a customer or evaluating becoming one:

• Your invoice has one line item, and its amount is the figure on the order form you signed. The same number every month, for the term.
• The dispute surface is nearly gone. Withdrawing the charge removed the only line whose amount depended on a calculation we performed.
• Cancelling owes nothing further. No tail, no clawback, no trailing charge on any saving. Everything you saved stays yours, before and after you leave.

If you signed an agreement that references the old terms, they do not apply to invoices raised on or after 7 September 2026. No invoice raised before that date is affected or reissued.