Why Synthos Prices in Credits, Not Seats

Seat pricing assumes usage scales with people. Validation does not work that way: a two-person research team preparing a foundation-model corpus can consume more validation than a fifty-person enterprise between training cycles. Charging either of them per seat punishes the wrong variable.

Credits map price to the thing that costs us and benefits you: validation work. A standard validation is 25 credits, an express run is 50, a warranty adds 15, a re-validation after fixes is 20. You can read your bill and see exactly what you bought.

Pricing is product design, and some designs corrupt the product. Metering by dataset size would punish thorough validation of large corpora — the exact behavior we exist to encourage. Subscription tiers with monthly quotas would push teams to skip validation in heavy months. Both were rejected because a pricing model that discourages validation is a pricing model that ships collapsed models.

Re-validation is deliberately the cheapest operation. The ideal customer journey is validate, fix the flagged rows, validate again — and the second pass should never feel like a penalty for doing the right thing.

Credits are sold in packages through Paddle checkout with hosted receipts, balances update as the payment webhook lands, and the dashboard warns before you run dry mid-cycle. Promo codes grant credits for trials, and every transaction sits in a history you can reconcile line by line. Nothing about billing should require a support ticket to understand — that is the bar we hold it to.