How we intend to sustainably bootstrap this.

Comitas is self-funded. VC dilution compresses what a company can allocate to public-benefit obligations over time, as investors expect returns that compete directly with that allocation. The plan from the start (in those VC-funded cases) is to extract as much profit as possible.

That model has funded a lot of innovation, but our hypothesis is that people are ready for a change from that model. We intend to leave the value in the company, sharing it with customers by keeping rates as low as possible, with employees as above-market wages, and supporting our environmental and social mission. We also intend to stay lean in terms of headcount, use AI to magnify our effectiveness, and then share those lessons and patterns with customers over time, furthering the goal of AI helping accelerate successful self-employment. Our goal is utilitarian: deliver the most good for the most people.

Rates are set as affordably as possible from day one. The platform fee itself will be tuned over time for sustainable growth and continued public value. We need a real operating buffer and a healthy margin to survive as a company, but we are protecting profits for reinvestment into the business, our people, and keeping costs low for customers. We will be conservative with rates and set them with the goal of first being sustainable, then going down once we sharpen the offset estimates and operating costs.

We realize those offsets are still unknown at this time. Any overestimates while continuing to tune the business model will be saved for offsets. Any underestimates will be backfilled in the future by tuning platform fees as needed, all with the goal of transparency and clarity on the true costs of paying our way environmentally and operating this venture as a public service.

<trigger_warning> Founders will take a salary and pay taxes like anyone else. </trigger_warning>

We don't like billionaires and successful companies paying no taxes any more than you do, and we intend to build our business structure toward that end, and lead by example toward a better economic model for employees and society in general.

No base fee. We tag and bill for all actual usage.

That base rate, before our platform fee, is our actual cloud infrastructure cost: what we pay our providers, passed through without markup. We continually optimize for the best value among the cloud providers listed as our external partners in our Terms of Service.

Everyone knows what a gallon or liter of gas or petrol costs, and what that means. Almost nobody knows what their AI subscription actually costs to run, or how much of it they're really using. Showing our base rate at cost is how we make that visible, so you can see what you're actually getting for what you pay and become a more knowledgable consumer.

On top of those real costs, Comitas takes a platform fee expressed as a percentage of your total utilization, not a flat fee. We actively tune that percentage over time as we gain more understanding of offsets and become more operationally efficient, and early adopters in the private alpha help us tune it through real, data-driven collaboration.

Funds you deposit lock in the platform rate as of the deposit date. If the rate goes up later, your balance is unaffected: you keep the rate you locked in until it's spent. If the rate goes down, deposited balances shift to the new, lower rate automatically. There's no downside to loading up early, only upside. Loading up could protect against future rate increases as we fine-tune offsets and operating costs, if it turns out we need to adjust them due to initial underestimate of the offsets' costs.

Onboarding is one or more free, persona-relevant guided experiments. The goal is to show you the real cost of these workloads, and make it easy to weigh that cost against what you actually got back in terms of quality of results and value of your time saved.