Transparent Economics

AI governance has a price. You should know it before we talk.

Every other governance vendor hides pricing behind “book a demo.” That’s because they’re selling custom consulting engagements disguised as software. We’re selling infrastructure. Infrastructure has a price.

If governance only works when you can afford a sales call, it’s not governance — it’s a luxury. Here’s what Ontic costs, what you get, and what you’d pay without it.

The platform

Flat monthly pricing. No per-query fees. No usage penalties. We want you building more oracles, not fewer.

Goober

Free

Coming March 1. Run it on Ollama. See governed vs. ungoverned outputs side by side. No account. No credit card. No call.

Goober is an 8B orchestration layer fine-tuned by Ontic Labs. It’s the proof that governance works — and the starting point for everything else.

Goober model (default + governed modes)
Local inference via Ollama (CPU, no GPU required)
Runs on a Mac Mini, a laptop, or anything with a pulse

This is where you start. Run the ibuprofen demo. Watch it refuse to guess a dosage without a receipt. Then ask yourself what that’s worth when the domain is yours.

Coming March 1

Studio

$5,000 / month

The self-service platform. You bring your domain. The builders do the work.

Studio is where you connect your data to the governance stack. The Oracle Builder researches authoritative sources, proposes oracle definitions, and infers verifiable axes. The Ontology Builder structures your domain into enforceable rules. You validate, adjust, and deploy — no Ontic staff required.

Goober model with full governance runtime
Oracle Builder — guided oracle creation from domain description to verified configuration
Ontology Builder — structured domain modeling with enforceable state axes
Tavily integration for live research and external data
Tooling connections for external APIs and registered data sources
AUTHORIZED / UNVERIFIED tagging with receipt provenance
Deterministic mode switching
Documentation and community support

Studio is designed so a competent engineer can stand up a governed domain in days, not months. The builders are the product. If you need a consulting team to use them, we’ve failed.

Start with Studio →

Refinery

$12,000 / month

Production governance for teams scaling across domains.

Refinery is Studio hardened for production. Signed metadata, version-controlled oracle registries, CI/CD for prompts and ontologies, staging environments for governance testing before deployment. This is where a company goes after proving the concept and rolling governance across departments.

Everything in Studio, plus:

Multi-domain governance — run multiple oracle-backed domains in parallel
Multi-seat with role-based access control
Signed metadata on all governance artifacts
Version-controlled oracle and ontology registries
CI/CD pipeline integration for governance configuration
Staging environments for governance testing before production
Advanced Tavily and tooling orchestration — multiple research sources, custom API integrations, scheduled oracle refreshes
Audit logs with signed entries
Dedicated onboarding support

The jump from Studio to Refinery is the jump from proof-of-concept to production infrastructure.

Scale with Refinery →

Clean Room

Starting at $250,000 / year

The sealed appliance. On-prem. Air-gapped. Hash-chained provenance on every output.

For regulated industries — healthcare, finance, legal, defense, insurance — where the audit trail isn’t a feature, it’s a legal requirement. The Clean Room is a physical or virtual appliance where Ontic supplies the containment, you supply the systems of record, and the system proves structurally that no unauthorized claim could have been produced.

Everything in Refinery, plus:

Clean Room appliance (physical or virtual, your hardware)
Immutable, hash-chained audit provenance — every decision cryptographically chained to the previous one
Air-gap capability — full stack runs with no external network dependency
TPM-sealed secrets management — API keys, oracle credentials, and model configuration never exist in application memory
Attested runtime with measured boot and verified artifacts
Mechanical gate — opaque boundary the model cannot see or reason around
End-to-end audit envelope: input state, matched rule, oracle evidence, gate decision, timestamp, and cryptographic hash
Enterprise SLA for oracle registry updates and security patches
Dedicated account team

When a regulator asks you to reconstruct a decision, you hand them the chain. Every input, every oracle consultation, every gate evaluation, every output — cryptographically linked, append-only, tamper-evident.

Multi-domain and federal pricing available on request. That’s not hiding — that’s scoping.

Deploy the Clean Room →

Oracle templates

Pre-built, Ontic-validated oracle configurations for common domains. Buy a template, connect your credentials, deploy.

Template	Domain	Price
FDA OTC Labeling	Drug labeling, dosage, safety warnings	$2,000
USDA FoodData Central	Nutrition facts, ingredient classification, allergens	$2,000
State Bar Verification	Attorney status, licensing, jurisdictional standing	$1,500
OSHA Compliance	Workplace safety regulations, violation classification	$1,500
SEC Filings	Public company disclosures, financial reporting	$2,000
Custom template request	Your domain, Ontic-validated	Contact us

Templates are versioned and maintained. When the FDA updates labeling guidance, your oracle updates with it. Templates are included at no additional cost for Refinery and Clean Room customers.

Guided buildout

For complex or novel domains where the builders need a running start.

This is not consulting. It’s a fixed-price, fixed-scope engagement with a defined deliverable: a working oracle configuration, a validated ontology, and a governance runtime for your specific domain. The engagement ends with a handoff to self-service. We build it, you own it, the builders maintain it.

Engagement	Scope	Price
Standard domain buildout	Single domain, established authoritative sources, 2–4 week delivery	$15,000
Complex domain buildout	Multi-source domain, cross-domain oracle coordination, 4–8 week delivery	$30,000
Novel domain buildout	No established oracle precedent, original research required, 6–12 week delivery	$50,000

The critical discipline: guided buildouts are always terminal. They end with a working configuration and a handoff, not a retainer. If you need ongoing help after the buildout, that’s a signal the builders need to be better — and we’ll make them better.

What you’re paying without Ontic

The real comparison isn’t Ontic vs. another governance platform. It’s Ontic vs. the total stack cost of doing this yourself.

Line item	Typical annual cost	With Ontic
Frontier model API fees	$500K – $2M+	Goober runs on CPU. No API fees.
GPU infrastructure (cloud or on-prem)	$200K – $2M+	Single GPU or CPU. No cluster.
AI governance platform (Credo AI, OneTrust, etc.)	$100K – $300K	Governance is the architecture, not an overlay.
Compliance consulting	$150K – $500K	Audit chain is built in. Hash-chained provenance.
Engineering team to integrate governance	$400K – $1M+ (2–4 engineers)	Builders replace integration work.
Data labeling and validation	$100K – $500K	Oracles are the ground truth. No labeling.
Total	$1.5M – $6M+	$60K – $500K depending on tier

These aren’t hypothetical numbers. Fortune 500 companies are spending $50M–$250M annually on generative AI. AI accounts for 12–15% of IT budgets. The governance layer alone — the part that’s supposed to make it safe — is a $4.8B market growing at 36% annually. And most of that spend is on dashboards that observe the problem after it happens.

Ontic doesn’t observe. Ontic prevents. The gate is mechanical. The audit trail is cryptographic. The model can’t see the rules it’s being evaluated against. That’s a fundamentally different architecture, and it costs a fraction of the alternative.

Summary

Tier	Price	For whom
Goober	Free	Anyone. Coming March 1. Free to run. See it work.
Studio	$5,000 / month	Engineers and teams building governed AI for the first time.
Refinery	$12,000 / month	Organizations scaling governance across multiple domains.
Clean Room	From $250,000 / year	Regulated industries where the audit trail is a legal requirement.
Oracle templates	$500 – $2,000 each	Pre-built domain coverage. Included in Refinery and Clean Room.
Guided buildout	$15,000 – $50,000	Complex domains. Fixed price. Fixed scope. Terminal engagement.

Every price on this page is real. We publish them because we believe governance is infrastructure, and infrastructure has a price you shouldn’t need a sales call to learn.

If your question isn’t answered here, talk to us. But you already know the numbers.