Starting at $0 — Pricing the AI Operations Secretary Tasukiba, All 3 Plans Open
The pricing table was, honestly, the hardest decision of the six months
Honestly: across the entire build of Tasukiba Knowledge Relay, what I struggled with the most wasn’t tech selection or UI — it was the pricing table.
“What price keeps the service alive, and still lets users join without guilt?” In front of that question, I built spreadsheet after spreadsheet, deleted them, built them again. What I eventually landed on is the line in today’s post: “pricing to continue, not pricing to extract.”
I’m not aiming to extract profit from this service to begin with. As I wrote in series part 1, I’m betting on the value of the service itself, and I want as many people using it as possible.
Billing exists for one reason: keeping the service alive for ten years. “Not to extract — to continue.” Written down, it sounds obvious. More than half of the time I spent on the pricing table, though, was me fighting the impulse to quietly conflate those two.
Today’s post unpacks how that belief lands in three plans and usage-based detail. It’s the science-of-spending post — “what is the money for?” — answered from the receiving end this time.
The three plans
| Plan | Seats | Monthly fixed | Usage (Project upsert) | Auto-tag model |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beginner | up to 5 | $0 | free up to 50/month, then billed | Haiku |
| Expert | unlimited | $0 | ¥10 / call | Haiku |
| Pro | unlimited | $0 | ¥15 / call | Sonnet (“Why?” feature = LLM re-ranking) |
※ The usage prices above are for LLM calls (tag extraction, “Why?” explanations). Embedding (asset entry, chat semantic search) is billed separately: free up to 100/month on Beginner, ¥5/call on Expert・Pro. DB capacity and file storage are usage-based too (below).
What’s behind the choices
- Every plan: $0 monthly fixed — months you don’t use cost zero
- Usage billed per “business operation” — many internal API calls collapse into a single user-visible charge
- No seat-based markup — large teams aren’t penalized (Expert / Pro have unlimited seats)
Why “project upsert: 50 free / month” on Beginner
Beginner has an unusual shape — “first 50 project create/update calls/month are free; after that, billed.”
That’s the balance between abuse prevention and adoption.
- Abuse prevention: prevent mass project creation that explodes LLM costs
- Adoption: typical use (a handful to dozens of projects per month) is fully free
The number 50 comes from my own usage logs as “a multiple of the realistic project count for an individual or small team.” Normal use never reaches 50. Reaching it is the signal that “you should probably move to Expert.”
No downgrade back to Beginner
ADR-0013:
Once a tenant is on Expert or Pro, they cannot return to Beginner.
This is abuse prevention.
- Prevents the cycle: go Expert → create lots of projects → downgrade to Beginner for the free tier → go back to Expert
- Beginner is the entry point for first-time users, not a refuge for heavy users
By blocking the downgrade path, Beginner stays as a real free tier for genuinely new users.
This is an exception to “return autonomy to the user,” which I’ll write about tomorrow. When exceptions exist, say honestly why — that’s a Tasukiba design rule.
DB and file storage: also usage-based
Cost components outside the plan:
- DB capacity — ADR-0020, usage-based, monthly charge per GB
- File storage — ADR-0021, usage-based, monthly charge per GB
Both are “pay for what you actually used, after the fact.”
Why post-pay instead of pre-pay? Because “billed for what I used this month” is intuitive, and doesn’t generate wasted prepayment.
A “pricing to extract” design would prefer monthly prepayment, locking in revenue even on unused capacity. Tasukiba deliberately doesn’t take that direction.
Cancellation and downgrade are UI-self-service
Plan changes, cancellation, storage add-on downgrades — all self-service.
- Cancellation: a “Cancel tenant” button completes it from the tenant settings panel. No vendor round-trip.
- Downgrade: a slider on the same panel.
- Re-signup after cancellation: same email, instant.
“We don’t block who comes in, we don’t block who leaves” — pushed down to the click level. The full story in tomorrow’s B-4.
The billing invariant — for transparency
Billing-backing data is recomputed on dashboard navigation, with a manual “recompute” button next to it, keeping numbers live.
Cron-cache isn’t relied on for billing because the goal is to make mis-billing physically impossible.
When a user sees “this month’s bill,” and it’s a snapshot from yesterday, they get uneasy. “This is the live number, right now” is what builds trust.
ApiCallLog → screen → invoice → CSV → Stripe API — every path reads from the same source of truth (ApiCallLog SUM). That’s Tasukiba’s “billing invariant for business continuity,” and it’s structurally enforced.
One sentence
Compressed:
Charge only for what was used, only for what should be charged, scaled to its unit cost, transparently. Keep the system’s own automation and learning support free.
That’s a different place to stand from “maximize extraction.” It’s a choice grounded in numbers, and a choice grounded in values.
Tomorrow closes Chapter B: how “return autonomy to the user” lands at the screen level.
Related posts
- The suggestion feature — putting “the past you forgot” back on screen — series part 8, suggestion engine
- Notes on the science of spending — where “what is the money for?” came from
- Six axes that set Tasukiba apart — why “pricing to continue” is one of the differentiation axes
About Tasukiba
Tasukiba Knowledge Relay starts at $0/month across all three plans. See the product page for plan details and the usage-based formula.
