Workflow A
Lead enrichment
- Cost per completed workflow: $0.18
- Successful completion rate: 94%
- Status: healthy
See what the paid AI workflow margin audit looks like
This sample uses fictional numbers. The real audit uses your redacted screenshots, exports, and workflow notes to show where margin is leaking, where guardrails should hard-stop, and what to fix first.
Executive diagnosis
The business does not have a generic "AI cost problem." It has one specific workflow margin problem. Lead enrichment looks healthy. PDF extraction is noisy but acceptable. Long-form account research is spending too much on retries and context growth relative to what the plan price can support.
Workflow B
PDF extraction
- Cost per completed workflow: $1.12
- Retry-heavy cases: 17%
- Status: watch closely
Workflow C
Account research agent
- Cost per completed workflow: $6.40
- Hard budget cap today: none
- Status: underwater
Facts used
- 14 days of redacted usage exports by workflow.
- 3 expensive traces with retries and tool-call fan-out.
- Plan pricing, included limits, and overage policy.
- Current stop conditions and revoke behavior after overages.
Unknowns
- Whether failures were caused by provider latency or prompt design.
- Whether gross margin differs by customer segment.
- Whether access should hard-stop or reconcile later after billing catch-up.
Top 3 leaks
- Retries after bad tool results keep spending after the useful outcome is already lost.
- Premium model default is used on low-value formatting and extraction steps.
- Over-budget accounts keep access long enough to consume extra AI cost before billing state reconciles.
Guardrail decisions
- Hard-stop now: account research workflow above $4.00 per run.
- Soft warn: PDF extraction when retries exceed 2 attempts.
- Reconcile later: billing-state mismatch under 2 hours, if product access is not granted.
First 3 fixes
- Cap account research at 2 model passes before fallback.
- Route low-value extraction to the cheaper model by default.
- Log one row per completed workflow with cost, retries, result quality, and billing state.
What the $199 action pack adds
- Workflow ledger schema for cost, retries, and business outcome on one row.
- Model routing and context-trimming checklist.
- Hard-cap vs soft-cap rules by workflow class.
- Billing, entitlement, and revoke-state reconciliation checklist.