Monthly costs
The optimized workflows cost $29,662 before the changes and $20,779 after normalization. The $8,883 monthly reduction includes $295 of new recurring operating costs. It excludes the service fee and $1,145 of one-time transition costs.
| Cost item | Before, USD | After, USD |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 API | 28,182 | 17,574 |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 API | 0 | 1,430 |
| Retrieval, reranking and orchestration | 1,480 | 1,480 |
| Quality checks and telemetry | 0 | 295 |
| Total | 29,662 | 20,779 |
At 485,000 incoming tasks, cost per incoming task fell from $0.0612 to $0.0428. This denominator includes incoming tasks regardless of final success. The new recurring costs cover step metadata, search-result caching and quality sampling.
Comparison basis
The financial baseline covers 30 days. Diagnosis used 60 days of logs and bills. The after comparison is normalized to 485,000 incoming tasks per month: variable token costs are scaled, while fixed retrieval, orchestration and telemetry costs remain unchanged. The project report describes two full months at 100% traffic, with monthly cost and quality checks. Task types, languages and document lengths were comparable with the baseline.
These are reported project results. Customer billing exports and acceptance records have not been independently audited for this publication. Project rates below describe this calculation, not a current provider price quote.
Token billing
Token volumes are in millions. The reported cache TTL is five minutes. Ordinary input, cache writes and cache reads are separate billing categories, without double counting.
| Model / category | Before volume | After volume | USD per million | Before USD | After USD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sonnet 4.6 / ordinary input | 1,960 | 1,084 | 3.00 | 5,880 | 3,252 |
| Sonnet 4.6 / cache write | 392 | 196 | 3.75 | 1,470 | 735 |
| Sonnet 4.6 / cache read | 9,840 | 5,890 | 0.30 | 2,952 | 1,767 |
| Sonnet 4.6 / output | 1,192 | 788 | 15.00 | 17,880 | 11,820 |
| Haiku 4.5 / ordinary input | 0 | 244 | 1.00 | 0 | 244 |
| Haiku 4.5 / cache write | 0 | 48 | 1.25 | 0 | 60 |
| Haiku 4.5 / cache read | 0 | 1,460 | 0.10 | 0 | 146 |
| Haiku 4.5 / output | 0 | 196 | 5.00 | 0 | 980 |
| API total | 28,182 | 19,004 |
These rates are the inputs supplied for this project. The workflow total also includes retrieval, orchestration and quality monitoring.
Evaluation and rollout
Implementation took 24 days, covering orchestration changes, offline replay, shadow evaluation and a 10%, 50%, 100% rollout. This is the reported project duration, not a general delivery promise.
The evaluation used a stratified set of 4,800 historical tasks that had not been used to tune prompts. It checked task outputs, CRM fields, knowledge-base references and access controls across six ticket types and four languages. The report also describes 1,950 shadow tasks. All external actions in shadow mode, including CRM writes and customer replies, ran in dry-run with payloads recorded in logs.
| Observation | Reported result | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| p95 latency | 6.4 to 4.9 seconds | Workflow latency reported for the comparison |
| Human escalation | 11.4% before and after | No additional manual load reported |
| ACL violations | 0 observed | Evaluated tenant and role isolation cases |
| Unauthorized actions | 0 observed | Evaluated actions; shadow side effects were dry-run |
Rollback preserved idempotency so changing the route did not duplicate existing CRM records. Zero observed violations describe the evaluated sample and are not a universal guarantee. The statistical task-accuracy result requires further methodological clarification before making a formal non-inferiority claim.
Transition costs and fee projection
| One-time cost | USD |
|---|---|
| Paired offline replay, 4,800 tasks | 580 |
| Dry-run shadow evaluation, 1,950 tasks | 145 |
| Automated validation and LLM-as-a-judge | 140 |
| Temporary context and log storage | 195 |
| Additional long-document runs | 85 |
| Total | 1,145 |
The client contributed 38 hours to labeling, validation rules, code review and release control. A monetary value for those hours is not included in the supplied cost table.
The fee rate is fixed at 30% of verified net savings over 12 agreed months, after approved transition and additional operating costs. With constant monthly savings of $8,883, the following figures are a projection:
| Twelve-month calculation | USD |
|---|---|
| Recurring savings, 12 × $8,883 | 106,596.00 |
| Less transition costs | 1,145.00 |
| Fee base | 105,451.00 |
| VorkLab fee, 30% | 31,635.30 |
| Client retains after transition and fee | 73,815.70 |
The first-month fee in this calculation is $2,321.40. A later month at the same saving would carry a $2,664.90 fee. These figures are not evidence of 12 months of collected savings or invoices. The $295 recurring cost is already in the after-cost total and is not deducted twice.
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Accepted projects have no upfront service fee. Fixed fee: 30% of verified net savings over 12 agreed months, after approved transition and additional operating costs.