The cost of being ready,
and the cost of being unready.

Both have a price. One appears on an invoice. The other accumulates silently — in missed agent traffic, compounding SaaS fees, and ownership you never build. The question is which cost you are currently paying, and whether you have done the comparison honestly.

Foundation

$5,000 one-time

This is the first layer: making your store visible and transactable to AI agents. Five protocols, deployed on your own VPS, owned by you. No SaaS equivalent exists — this infrastructure either gets built or it doesn't. The table below shows what each piece would cost if you commissioned it from a developer or agency yourself.

What's deployed Agency-built or DIY — not yours to keep
their code · their maintenance · your dependency
Foundation — you own it
ACP checkout endpoint + agent-purchase.json Custom dev: $1,500–$3,000
AP2 — Google mandate chain (JWS-signed, P-256) Specialist dev: $3,000–$6,000
UCP-MCP server — 5 tools for Claude + MCP agents Custom dev: $2,500–$4,500
A2A agent discovery card with JWS proof Custom dev: $1,200–$2,500
ABT-C v2 — cryptographic PII layer (US Prov. 64/056,353) Patent-pending — not available elsewhere
AI-vs-human transaction dashboard on your VPS Custom build: $2,000–$4,000
Live install + verification on your server Agency project management: $500–$1,000 ✓ 60-min call
Ongoing protocol support as specs evolve Dev retainer: $300–$600 / month ✓ VIP email, included
Total equivalent cost $13,700–$24,000 to build + $300–$600/mo to maintain $5,000 once

Immediate build savings

$8,700–$19,000

vs. hiring a dev agency

Annual retainer savings

$3,600–$7,200

VIP support included — no retainer

Break-even vs. retainer

Month 8–17

retainer savings alone, before any revenue

JARVIS Suite

$20,000 one-time · Foundation required first

This is the second layer: JARVIS replaces your entire stack of hired people and SaaS tools — and on top of that, we install an AI agent on your VPS and train you to use it. Not support forever. We teach you how to support yourself. After day 60, you have your own AI infrastructure and the knowledge to run it independently.

REAL-WORLD OPERATING COST — OUR OWN SYSTEM

89 tasks / day  ·  3 websites  ·  < $1.00 / day in AI API costs

Your keys, your compute, your cost. The intelligence layer is the cheapest part of running it — and it scales to any number of properties at roughly the same cost per site.

Capability What others charge / month
hire a person · or rent a SaaS tool · you don't own either
JARVIS Suite — your API keys, near-zero cost
Four Commerce Agents
Discovery Optimizer — daily AI-optimized ACP manifest Specialist dev retainer: $300–$500  · no SaaS equivalent ✓ Runs daily  · Claude API ~$0/day
Cart Recovery — AI-personalized email + SMS Email agency: $500–$1,500  · Klaviyo (tool only): $45–$400 ✓ 4× daily  · Resend free tier
Checkout Intelligence — daily audit, never a blocker CRO consultant: $500–$2,000  · Hotjar (tool only): $99 ✓ Autonomous  · Claude API ~$0/day
Post-Purchase sequences — day 1 / 7 / 30, brand voice Email specialist: $500–$1,500  · Klaviyo (tool only): $45–$400 ✓ Per order  · Resend free tier
89-Task Autonomous Backbone
SEO monitoring, rank tracking + reporting SEO agency: $1,000–$3,000  · Ahrefs/SEMrush (tool only): $120–$129 ✓ Daily  · GSC API free
Blog content writing + publishing Freelance writer/agency: $500–$3,000  · Jasper (tool only): $49 ✓ Daily  · just provide your brand voice
Social media management — content + scheduling Social media manager: $500–$2,000  · Buffer (tool only): $18 ✓ Daily  · Zernio API $49
Security monitoring + CVE scanning Managed security service: $200–$500  · Sucuri/Wordfence (tool only): $119–$299 ✓ + self-heal  · no subscription
Nightly full-system backup Managed backup service: $50–$200  · Jetpack/BackupBuddy: $50–$80 ✓ Your storage  · Cloudflare R2 free tier
Site self-healing — auto-detect and fix issues Dev on-call retainer: $300–$600  · no SaaS equivalent ✓ Autonomous  · Claude API ~$0/day
Daily strategy + performance reporting Digital agency retainer: $1,000–$3,000  · no SaaS equivalent ✓ Inbox 7:30 AM  · Claude API ~$0.30/day
Three training sessions — learn to use your own AI agent Consultant: $450–$750/session  · ongoing retainer after ✓ Included  · future support is yours to run
What businesses pay for people/agencies to do all this $5,000–$17,000 / month for humans
Or $600–$1,500 / month for tools alone (you still manage them)
$20,000 once
~$49/mo Zernio · everything else near-zero

Break-even (conservative)

Month 4

at $5,000/mo in people cost replaced

Break-even (typical)

Month 2

at $10,000/mo in people cost replaced

Year 2 savings

$60K–$204K

fully compounding, $0 new cost

That's $60,000–$204,000/year in people costs replaced by a system that runs on your server, uses your own API keys, and you own forever.

THE POINT OF THE TRAINING

We're not trying to keep you dependent on us. We're teaching you to fish.

An AI agent is installed on your VPS, connected to your own Anthropic API key. That agent becomes your support system. Once the three training sessions are complete, you know how to use it. Future questions, future modifications, future debugging — you handle it yourself, using the same AI tooling we used to build the system.

This is what the $20,000 actually buys: not a subscription to our attention, but the knowledge and infrastructure to operate independently. After day 60, most clients never need to contact us again. That's the goal.

Two paths. One ownership model.

Every option includes full source code, deployment to your own VPS, and the same guarantee: no payment until you've watched it work on your server.

Foundation installs first — JARVIS follows after you confirm it works. Total if both: $25,000.

The cost of being unready

This cost is less visible because it never appears on an invoice. It accumulates in three places.

Missed agent traffic. ChatGPT, Operator, and Perplexity are routing purchases to ACP-compliant stores and skipping the rest. If your store is not agent-ready, you are not losing traffic you can see in your analytics — you are not appearing in a channel you cannot measure yet. The scale of that channel will only become visible after the stores that got there early have built a meaningful advantage.

Compounding SaaS fees. The standard commerce stack — cart recovery, recommendations, post-purchase automation — runs $500–$2,000/month for a store at $30k/month in revenue. At $1,000/month, that is $12,000/year in access fees that produce no owned asset. The fees scale with the business. After 24 months at $1,000/month, you have paid $24,000 and own nothing. The capability is still rented.

Ownership deferred. Every month you continue renting your commerce infrastructure, you defer building something you will eventually need to build — or accept that you never will. The stores that own their agent infrastructure today will have two years of performance data, two years of trained models, and two years of compounding organic content by the time the market normalizes.

The gap widens every week

While you're deciding, stores already in the green ring are compounding. Target, Sephora, and Walmart have already deployed agent commerce infrastructure. The question isn't whether this shift is real — it's whether you're in the first wave or the catch-up wave.

Your current stack — Klaviyo, Rebuy, CartHook — was built for human browsers. It has no answer for an AI agent that queries structured data directly, bypasses email flows, and routes payments through your ACP endpoint before your cart recovery tool fires.

PROJECTED AGENT COMMERCE SHARE OF TRANSACTIONS

2025
3%
2026
12%
2027
28%
2028
45%+

Projected figures based on OpenAI/Adobe Analytics adoption curves · stores without agent infrastructure capture 0% of this channel

Foundation doesn't replace your existing stack. It adds the channel it can't serve. As that channel grows, the math on whether you need those subscriptions changes on its own.

What the price includes

The price covers everything inside the engagement:

  • Discovery and scoping (understanding your catalog, your session data, your specific problem)
  • Agent design and architecture for your specific use case
  • Full development — agent logic, API integrations, decision models
  • Deployment to your VPS with configuration and testing
  • Documentation for your team
  • Dedicated VIP email for ongoing support (Foundation); three training sessions + ongoing support with no end date (JARVIS Suite)

The price does not cover your VPS hosting ($10–20/month from your chosen provider), any AI API costs that the agents may incur at runtime (typically $5–30/month at the volumes most stores operate at), or changes to scope that arise after the engagement starts and represent materially different work than what was agreed.

One thing that is part of every initial conversation: a review of your current stack for operational cost savings. This is not guaranteed, but it is common — a store paying for three tools where one replaces two of them at a fraction of the cost. Where savings exist, they get surfaced before the build starts. In many cases, the identified savings partially or fully offset the cost of the engagement over 12–18 months — independent of any revenue gains the agents produce.

The convenience trap

Out-of-the-box tools are built for the median store. The default email sequences, the plug-in recommendation widgets, the standard cart recovery flows — they work passably for the average use case, and they are genuinely easy to set up. That convenience has a cost that is not on the pricing page.

The more you depend on those tools, the more you pay as you grow. Pricing scales with usage. Vendor updates change behavior without your input. Features get deprecated when the vendor pivots. The capability is never quite yours — it is access rights to someone else's system, and those rights come with conditions.

JARVIS and the commerce agent stack work differently. The pipeline uses Resend for email, Google APIs for indexing and analytics, and a small set of other services — some free, some with marginal per-use costs. You hold the API keys. You choose the services. You can swap components as better options emerge. Nothing is locked to a vendor's product roadmap.

The relevant question is not the upfront cost of the build. It is whether the control gap — between renting someone else's defaults and owning something built specifically for your store — is worth closing.

Two paths, one ownership model — Foundation at $5K, JARVIS Suite at $20K
Two paths, one ownership model — Foundation at $5K, JARVIS Suite at $20K

When the cost does not make sense yet

There is a revenue floor below which a custom build is not the right call yet. At $5,000/month in revenue, even a 20% improvement in conversion rate produces $1,000/month — which means the Foundation build pays off in five months. That is still a reasonable investment if you have conviction in the growth trajectory.

Below $5,000/month, or pre-launch, the math is harder to make work without assumptions that may not hold. The application asks about your current revenue and the specific problem you're solving — if the numbers don't support a build yet, the honest answer is to say so rather than take the engagement.

Agents are a performance layer. They improve what is already working. A store that is not yet working — wrong product, wrong audience, wrong pricing — will execute against the wrong premise more efficiently after the build, which is not an improvement.

Two diverging paths — one rising SaaS cost curve versus a flat owned infrastructure line
The accumulation gap — SaaS fees compound against you, owned infrastructure costs stay fixed as volume scales

Support costs go down, not up

This is not a monthly support contract. The build is a discrete engagement — a defined scope, a delivery window, a handoff, and working code you own outright. The ongoing cost is your VPS and your API keys. That is it.

The support included post-handoff is there to bridge the gap between delivery and your team's confidence with the system. As that confidence builds, the need for external support decreases. The system is documented for that reason. The goal is a stack your team can operate, modify, and extend without depending on the builder for every change.

This is structurally different from SaaS tools, where the support cost is baked into a monthly fee forever, and your dependency on the vendor never actually goes down. With this build, the trajectory runs the other way: cost at handoff, knowledge growth after, support dependency approaching zero as your team gets comfortable. The build permanently lowers the cost floor of running your commerce infrastructure.

How payment works

Foundation — Package #1 — carries zero upfront cost. You apply, scope is confirmed, the build is delivered live on a live on-screen session, and payment is made only after you can see the agents running on your server. No invoice goes out until the system is verified on that call. You are not paying for a promise — you are paying for working code you have already watched deploy.

JARVIS Suite engagements are structured as milestones with payment tied to delivery stages, discussed during the scoping call after application approval. If the agents are not working as specified at the end of the delivery window, the full amount is returned.

No hidden costs.
No surprises after yes.

Foundation $5,000: you only pay after a successful live test. JARVIS Suite $20,000: 89 daily autonomous tasks + four commerce agents, 60-day delivery, ongoing support with no end date. Full source ownership on both.

Apply for a build → ← Back to Agentic Commerce overview