Antimetal charges nothing until it saves you money

Antimetal is a cloud cost optimization company, and the way it charges is worth paying attention to. It doesn’t sell a subscription. For startups, it’s free in year one. For bigger customers, it takes a straight 10% cut of the AWS savings it actually finds. No savings, no fee. This came up in an August 18 podcast interview with the company’s Head of Ops.

Think about what that pricing model does to the sales conversation. Most tools ask you to trust a demo and pay upfront, then hope the ROI shows up later. Antimetal flips it. They find the waste in your AWS bill, you keep 90% of what they find, and if they can’t find anything, you owe them nothing. That’s a much easier yes for a CFO, and it forces the vendor to actually deliver instead of just describe.

For business owners, the lesson isn’t really about cloud bills. It’s about pricing structure. A lot of AI and software tools are still sold on flat retainers, priced for the vendor’s convenience rather than the customer’s outcome. Antimetal shows there’s a real alternative when the value you deliver can be measured cleanly, like dollars saved. If your product can point to a number that goes up or down because of what you did, a results-share fee is often a fairer deal for both sides, and it can be a faster way to close new business.

This is exactly the kind of model we think about when we design pricing for AI systems. If a workflow you build saves a client real hours or real money, a component tied to that outcome, sitting alongside a flat fee, can make the pitch a lot more convincing. It’s the kind of thing we build into an AI command centre, where you can actually track what’s being saved and price against it with confidence, not guesswork.