Pricing
Runtime pricing
follows real use.
Your Sonzai agents are always on — companions, characters, NPCs, front-of-house — ready to engage your users 24/7. Runtime is based on real interactions, measured in work units. No per-seat pricing. Self-serve has no platform fee. Idle agents cost nothing. Enterprise delivery is scoped separately.
What's a work unit?
Engineers call them tokens. Same thing.
A work unit is one small piece of an interaction — roughly three-quarters of a word your agent reads or writes. Every time a user talks to your agent and the agent thinks, recalls, and replies, work units are consumed. They're the cleanest measure of “a real conversation, with a real user.” You only pay when they're ticking up.
- ~750 words ≈ 1,000 work units
- A typical user message is ~30 work units.
- A typical AI reply is ~150 work units.
- A long back-and-forth conversation is usually 2K–10K work units — a few cents at most on a cost-efficient model.
What you're actually paying for.
Runtime scales with use. Self-serve customers pay the two published runtime charges below. Enterprise delivery is quoted separately.
Work units
(industry term: tokens)
Provider price + service fee
Every word your agent reads or writes during a conversation is a work unit. You're billed only for actual user interactions — never for an idle agent. The service fee covers per-user and per-agent memory, the consolidation jobs that keep memory coherent, our proprietary self-learning models, and the ML engineers and AI specialists running it all.
- Managed keys: provider price + service fee, one invoice
- BYOK (recommended): pay the provider directly; the service fee applies only to work units routed through the harness
- BYOK lets you use your own discounts, rate limits, and audit the bill
Live agents
always on, 24/7
$0.50 / agent / month
An agent is the persona — its memory, personality, tools, and rules. Once it exists, it's always on, ready to engage your users around the clock. You're charged only for personas a real user actually talked to this month. Drafts, tests, and dormant agents are free.
- Unlimited users per agent (no per-seat charge)
- Dormant or draft agents don't bill
- Usage report you can hand to finance
Enterprise delivery
fixed pilot, optional continuity
Fixed scope, fixed fee
Start with a defined platform + forward-deployed engineering pilot. After the pilot, continue on runtime alone or choose an optional platform license with agreed engineering capacity, plus the governance and support defined in the agreement.
- Pilot: defined workflow, deliverables, acceptance criteria, and handover
- Ongoing license: agreed engineering capacity; extra engineering work scoped separately
- Runtime stays usage-based: provider price plus the service fee, and $0.50 per live agent per month
We're not pocketing it.
The model provider charges us per work unit. We charge you the same number plus a service fee. That fee pays for everything that turns a stateless LLM into a relational agent that gets better at your users over time: per-user and per-agent memory, the background jobs that keep memory coherent, the proprietary self-learning models we train per agent-user pair, and the ML engineers and AI specialists who keep the whole stack running.
Always-on API, MCP server, regional failover, monitoring, security.
Each user gets a private memory namespace; each agent has its own state too — indexed, encrypted, retrievable in milliseconds.
Summarisation, importance scoring, deduplication, forgetting curves, embedding refresh — the slow work that keeps memory coherent.
Sonzai trains proprietary models per agent-user relationship and stores them with the agents. The moat — and not a fresh-LLM swap.
The team that trains, tunes, and on-calls the relationship layer day-to-day. Model evals, drift, retraining, incidents.
Yes, really. A small slice so we can keep building. No SaaS-style markup.
The exact split shifts with scale, region, and the model you choose. The service fee pays for the relationship layer — it applies whether you use Sonzai-managed keys or bring your own (BYOK). The difference with BYOK is that you pay the provider directly, with their rates, your discounts, and your own rate limits — and the bill is fully auditable on the provider side.
A real example.
A consumer app with about 100,000 users talking to three live agent personas — say a companion, a guide, and an NPC — running on GPT-5.5-mini. A per-seat platform would bill this north of six figures a month. Sonzai bills the work units.
GPT-5.5-mini at ~$0.25/M input + $1.00/M output. ~70M input and ~30M output work units across the month (100M total), plus our service fee on those work units. No per-seat charges, no per-user charges.
Pilot first. Choose what follows.
We scope the first deployment around a defined workflow, outcome, and handover. The fixed pilot fee covers the Sonzai platform configuration and forward-deployed engineering required to get it live.
After the pilot, you can run on transparent runtime alone or choose an ongoing platform license with agreed engineering capacity, plus the governance and support defined in the agreement. Work beyond that allocation is scoped separately.
Define the pilot
Agree the workflow, deliverables, milestones, acceptance criteria, and handover before work begins.
Choose the operating model
Continue on runtime alone, or add an optional platform license with agreed engineering capacity, plus the governance and support defined in the agreement.
Keep runtime transparent
Live use stays usage-based — provider price plus the service fee, and $0.50 per live agent per month — in either operating model.
Two ways to buy. Same transparent runtime.
Integrate directly and pay published runtime, or start with a fixed-scope enterprise pilot. After the pilot, an optional platform license can include agreed engineering capacity, plus the governance and support defined in the agreement. Extra engineering work is scoped separately. Live use stays usage-based: provider price plus the service fee, and $0.50 per live agent per month.