Infrastructure Pricing

Section 1

Three deployment options. One software stack.

Every client gets the same stack. The choice is where the hardware lives. Swift's default recommendation is colocation: Ag Express owns the hardware and gets real redundancy without needing a server-ready building. Cloud is always available as a starting point; a move to owned hardware requires no software rebuild.

Option 1

On-Premises

Hardware in Ag Express's own facility. Highest sovereignty. Lowest monthly cost. Repair records, equipment manuals, and diagnostic logs never leave the building. Best for operations with a stable shop and IT-capable staff.

Option 2 (Recommended)

Colocation

Ag Express-owned hardware in a data center rack. Full ownership without building risk. Real redundancy built in. Best default for most clients who want sovereignty without managing a server room on-site.

Option 3

Cloud

Rented servers on DigitalOcean. No upfront hardware cost. Highest monthly cost at scale. Identical software stack; can move to owned hardware at any point with no rebuild required.

	On-premises	Colocation	Cloud
Hardware owner	Ag Express	Ag Express	Provider
Cost pattern	Upfront, low monthly	Upfront + rack fee	No upfront, highest monthly
Local AI inference	Yes, owned GPUs	Yes, owned GPUs	Rented or via Swift
Data sovereignty	Highest	High	Lowest

Section 2

Six server roles behind one gateway.

Same names on-premises, in colo, and in the cloud. Runbooks and monitoring work identically everywhere. Ag Express holds the ArcVault root key from day one in every option. Swift's access is scoped, logged, and removable at any time.

Role	What it does
ArcGate	Firewall, VPN, network zones, DNS
ArcHelm	Kubernetes, Ag Express web and API, Surface, Bench and Field tablet interfaces
ArcData	Postgres (work orders, equipment records), Neo4j (knowledge graph, diagnostic corpus), ClickHouse (repair telemetry, parts analytics), object storage (manuals, wiring diagrams, ECU firmware)
ArcVault	Keys, secrets, Ledger. Ag Express holds root key from day one in every option.
ArcRig	GPU inference: diagnostic reasoning, voice intake transcription and classification, natural language search over the repair corpus, fine-tuning on Ag Express's own repair history
ArcBuild	CI runners, preview environments, agent build lanes

Section 3

Cloud infrastructure costs, billed direct, no markup.

These costs apply during the build phase for all options, and as the full ongoing cost for Option 3 (cloud-first). All accounts registered to Ag Express. Figures verified against DigitalOcean and Cloudflare current rates (Sept 2026); re-confirm at proposal time.

Dev AI Tooling (during build)

Tier 1: 1 developer~$1,000 / mo

Tier 2: 2 developers~$2,000 / mo

Tier 3: 3 developers~$3,000 / mo

Rate per developer$1,000 / mo

Includes frontier model API access, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and AI-powered CI. All accounts registered to Ag Express.

Cloud Infrastructure (DigitalOcean + Cloudflare)

App + API (2 nodes, 4 vCPU / 16 GB each)$252

Managed Postgres HA (work orders, equipment records)$122

Neo4j (diagnostic corpus, knowledge graph)$168

ClickHouse (repair telemetry + analytics)$63

Object storage R2 (manuals, diagrams, ECU firmware)$15

CDN, DNS, monitoring, CI/CD runners$75

Est. during build~$695 / mo

Post-launch base: ~$1,300/mo. Scales with active technicians, equipment corpus size, and voice intake load. All cloud accounts registered to Ag Express; zero platform take-rate.

Cost item	Phase	Monthly	Who pays
Dev AI toolingAPIs, Claude Code, Copilot, CI, per developer on the engagement	During build	$1,000 / dev	Ag Express
Cloud infrastructure (build phase)App/API, Postgres, Neo4j, ClickHouse, storage, CDN	During build	~$695	Ag Express
Cloud infrastructure (post-launch)Scales with technician count and diagnostic corpus size	Post-launch	~$1,300+	Ag Express

Ownership: Every cloud account (DigitalOcean, Cloudflare) is registered under Ag Express credentials from day one. Swift has scoped access for deployment and monitoring; access is logged and removable. No vendor lock-in: the full stack runs on standard infrastructure any engineer can take over.

Section 4

On-premises and colocation hardware (Options 1 and 2).

Hardware is identical across on-prem and colo. Colocation adds a monthly rack fee; the client's facility costs are removed. Get vendor quotes before any number goes into a proposal. GPU hardware is priced separately in Section 5.

Tier	Users / Agent lanes	Server hardware	Colo monthly (half rack, 5 kW)
Small	Under 25 users, 1-2 lanes	~60% of Standard	Market rate, 2-3 local quotes
Standard	25-75 users, 3 lanes	$30,000-$91,000	Market rate, 2-3 local quotes
Large	75+ users, 6+ lanes	~175% of Standard	Market rate, 2-3 local quotes

Hardware sourcing: The $30,000 floor assumes certified refurbished servers (Techbuyer, ServerMonkey, eBay Business). The $91,000 ceiling is all-new. Compute nodes (ArcHelm, ArcBuild) and switches are good candidates for refurbished. UPS units, PDUs, and ArcVault nodes should be new or under current warranty; power protection and key storage are not places to accept unknown service history.

Section 5

GPU options for the Ag Express Repair Intelligence Engine.

GPU hardware powers the AgX Brain: diagnostic reasoning over equipment manuals and ECU data, voice intake transcription and classification, natural language search across the repair corpus, and fine-tuning on Ag Express's own repair history. GPU prices must be re-verified the week each proposal is sent.

Starter Build

~$13,000

2x RTX 5090 (32 GB each)

Fits 1-2 agent lanes and Bench tool at launch scale. Runs 70B-class models for diagnostic reasoning and voice classification. Cards can be upgraded later without replacing server hardware.

Standard Build (Recommended)

~$39,000

2x RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q (96 GB each)

Fits 3-6 agent lanes. 192 GB total VRAM. Runs diagnostic reasoning, voice intake, and corpus search simultaneously. Covers the full Bench, Field, and Voice intake stack at scale.

Heavy Build

~$78,000-$83,000

4x RTX PRO 6000 Server Edition (96 GB each)

384 GB total VRAM. Multiple large models serving many agent lanes, high-concurrency Bench tool usage, and fine-tuning in parallel. Server Edition is passive-cooled for rack use.

GPU memory	Runs well (4-bit quantized)
64 GB (2x RTX 5090)	70B-class models: diagnostic reasoning, voice classification, structured repair drafting
96-192 GB (1-2x RTX PRO 6000)	Corpus search, 70B at higher quality, several models simultaneously for multi-surface use
384 GB (4x RTX PRO 6000)	Multiple large models, many concurrent agent lanes, fine-tuning on repair history in parallel

Re-quote rule: GPU prices have roughly doubled since launch as AI data centers absorbed the world's memory supply. The September 2026 numbers above are a floor, not a ceiling. Every GPU number must be re-verified the week the proposal is sent.

Section 6

Frontier API baseline: what the platform costs today.

What Ag Express pays for AI before any owned inference hardware. Frontier API and SaaS tooling scale linearly with team and agent count. They do not decrease as usage grows; unlike owned hardware, they carry no fixed ceiling.

AI-Assisted Development (full stack)

Raw API usage per developer$100-$300 / mo

Claude Code + GitHub Copilot~$400 / mo

AI-powered CI tooling~$300 / mo

All-in per developer~$1,000 / mo

Autonomous Agent Lanes (Bench, Field, Voice)

Business hours only (~8 hr/day)$500-$1,500 / lane

24/7 lane$1,500-$3,000 / lane

3 lanes 24/7 (example)$6,000 / mo

Frontier API and SaaS tooling costs scale linearly with every new developer and agent lane added. Owned hardware costs are fixed once purchased; every additional agent lane after payback is near-zero marginal cost.

Section 7

The ownership argument.

The core case for buying hardware rather than renting cloud GPUs indefinitely. Scenario: Standard ArcRig build vs. renting equivalent H100 compute from DigitalOcean through Swift.

Frontier API monthly

$6,000

3 agent lanes at ~$2,000/lane/mo. Scales with every new lane added.

Owned inference monthly

~$1,100

Standard ArcRig amortized over 3 years (~$54k total hardware). Near-zero marginal cost after payback period.

Annual savings

~$59,000

Hardware pays itself back in 8-10 months. Everything after is inference at near-zero marginal cost.

Comparison	DO base rate	2x GPU 24/7 (base)	Cost to Ag Express
H100 on-demand (DO)	$4.41/GPU/hr	$6,440/mo	$8,370/mo
H100 reserved 12-month (DO)	$3.26/GPU/hr	$4,760/mo	$6,190/mo
Standard ArcRig owned (2x RTX PRO 6000)	$39,000 one-time hardware		~$1,100/mo amortized

Standard ArcRig vs. reserved DO H100 through Swift ($6,190/mo): payback in 6-7 months. Every month after that is ~$6,190 kept. Over 36 months, owned hardware saves approximately $183,000 vs reserved H100 rental, before power costs.

Section 8

Own or borrow from Swift: start anywhere, move anytime.

Ag Express can borrow any component from Swift's Grid until usage justifies owning it. The software stack is identical regardless of which option is chosen. Moving from borrowed to owned requires no rebuild at any point.

Component	Ag Express owns	Borrowed from Swift
Brain (ArcRouter + models)	Runs on Ag Express ArcRig; all repair data and corpus stays in Ag Express infrastructure	Ag Express apps call Swift's Grid through ArcRouter; no GPUs needed on-site
Vault (keys, secrets, Ledger)	Runs on Ag Express ArcVault nodes	Swift hosts it; Ag Express receives SDK and scoped keys
Surface workspace	Runs on Ag Express ArcHelm	Workspace on Swift's Surface instance
Build pipeline	Runs on Ag Express ArcBuild nodes	Builds run on Swift's runners, billed per use

Section 9

Proposal and re-quote rules.

Hardware costs are planning estimates; get vendor quotes before any number goes into a final proposal. Labor retainers are quoted separately.

Item	Rule
GPU prices	Re-verify the week the proposal is sent. RTX PRO 6000 prices have been volatile; September 2026 figures are a floor, not a ceiling.
Server hardware	Re-confirm within 30 days. Get vendor quotes before any number goes into a final proposal.
Colocation rack fees	Get 2-3 local quotes per proposal. Rates vary by market and facility tier.
Cloud compute	Confirm ArcBuild node count against Ag Express's actual agent lanes before finalizing. Section 3 figures are based on verified DO rates (Sept 2026).
Markup basis	Cloud accounts billed at vendor rate with no markup. Labor retainers are a separate line item in every proposal.

Three paths to ownyour AI stack.