How we calculated every number.
A short, honest accounting of every assumption in the six-widget tool. We made these choices. You can pressure-test them. Where we used a public source or our own platform data, we say so.
Widget 01Stack — the audit of what you're paying for
What's in the tile set
25 representative AI subscriptions across text, research, image, video, audio, and publishing/ops. The text and research rows include the providers gimmefy auto-routes to. The image, video and audio rows mix gimmefy-included providers (Veo, Kling, Seedance, ElevenLabs, Imagen) with honest outsiders (Ideogram, Recraft, Runway, Suno, Descript). The publishing/ops row (Buffer, Hootsuite, Zapier, Notion AI, Meeting AI) is entirely outside gimmefy.
Per-tool monthly cost — 2026 standard-tier retail
Each tile uses the standard subscription tier from the provider's public pricing page — what most agency teams actually pay. Examples: ChatGPT Plus $20, Claude Pro $20, Gemini Advanced $20, Perplexity Pro $20, Grok Premium+ $30, DeepSeek Pro $15, ElevenLabs Creator $22, Kling 3.0 standard $25, Buffer Essentials $15, Hootsuite Pro $50 (revised up in 2026), Notion AI $10.
The two "power-tier" subscription tiles
Claude Max and ChatGPT Pro are shown as separate tiles at $200/seat each — for the small subset of teams that actually have those subscriptions (typically 1-2 power users on a 25-person agency, not everyone). Tick those only if your team is on them. If your team is just on the standard $20 tier, leave them off — the math stays defensible.
The two "power-user" optional tiles
Two more tiles cover the things between standard subscriptions and full enterprise contracts — the parts most diagnostics miss.
API access at $100/seat-equivalent. Represents direct OpenAI / Anthropic / Google API spend for technical staff running custom workflows, batch jobs, or scripted automations. Real API bills are highly variable — anywhere from $20 to $500 per heavy user per month depending on usage. $100 is a defensible mid-point for a moderate-usage power user. Tick this only if your team actually runs any direct API calls outside of subscription products.
Meeting AI at $25/seat. Covers Otter, Fireflies, Granola, or similar meeting-transcription products. Most agencies have one of these but few mention it on a tool audit. Tick if you do.
Formula — monthly subscription cost
sum(selected_per_seat_cost) × team_size
Formula — hidden cost (the "context-switching tax")
count_selected × team_size × 2 hrs/week × $50/hr ÷ 4.33 (divisor converts weekly to monthly). 2 hrs/week per person per tool is conservative — multiple productivity studies put it higher when tools don't talk to each other. The $50/hr blended rate is conservative for North America/EU mid-market agencies; generous for SEA/India.
"In one platform" indicator
Tiles where gimmefy actively routes to the same provider light up the counter — Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Manus, Imagen, Veo, Kling, Seedance, ElevenLabs. Publishing/ops + image specialists (Ideogram, Recraft) + Runway + Suno + Descript stay outside the counter. Pretending we replaced Buffer would burn trust.
Widget 02Context — the cost of the AI forgetting your brand
What's in the tile set
17 context pains organised in four groups: every-brief restarts (4 tiles), model handoffs (the messy bit, 6 tiles), between-people friction (4 tiles), and three explicitly human-only tiles (client politics, team chemistry, CEO gut feel) that gimmefy is honestly outside of.
Per-tile time cost
Each tile carries a per-person-per-week hour figure ranging from 0.3 to 1.0. Model handoffs typically 0.5-0.7 hrs/wk (text-to-image colour re-typing, text-to-video pacing re-explained, etc.); brief restarts 0.3-0.5; junior-senior bottleneck 1.0.
Formula — annual cost
sum(selected_hrs) × team_size × 52 weeks × $50/hr.
Formulas — caught and leaked outputs
Off-brand outputs caught/month = included_tiles × team_size ÷ 4 — approximates the editorial-review burden.
Reached client anyway = included_tiles × team_size ÷ 18 — conservative: roughly 1 in 18 caught outputs leaks past review. Most agencies' reviewers catch more than this; we erred generous to gimmefy.
The qualitative tags
Seven tags escalating from "mild context tax" (1 tile) to "everyone is tired, including the AI" (13 tiles). Visual texture only — no dollar value.
Widget 03Capabilities — build-vs-buy
What's in the tile set
20 representative marketing capabilities stated in agency-CEO language (not gimmefy taxonomy: no Maestro, Skill, or Playbook). Four tiles flagged as bespoke because they require a custom build in gimmefy. Those builds are scoped privately.
"Build it yourself" prices
Typical 2026 freelance/agency quotes for marketing AI custom work — Skills $1-3k, single workflows $8-15k, personas $3-5k, decision-support tools $10-20k, production tools $10-20k.
Formula — annual maintenance
25% of upfront × (1 + (team-12) × 0.02). Maintenance scales mildly with team size.
Formula — months to ship
Longest tile's build time (in weeks) ÷ 4.33.
gimmefy custom-build terms
Custom Skills, Maestros and Playbooks are scoped privately by use case, depth, ownership and rollout plan.
gimmefy partner terms
White-label commercial terms are not published publicly; they are sized to the partner's deployment shape, usage profile and resale model.
Widget 04Governance — friction plus tail risk
Two cost types, by design
Friction — hrs/week per person, recurring. Comes mostly from the collaboration tiles.
Risk — $/year expected (probability × severity). Comes mostly from the security/compliance and client-facing tiles.
Formula — friction annual
sum(selected_hrs) × team × 52 × $50/hr.
Formula — risk annual
sum(annual_expected_$) × (1 + (team-12) × 0.02). Risk scales mildly with team size — more people = more attack surface.
Per-tile risk values
Industry benchmarks for AI/data incident costs in 2026. Examples — $15k for a minor compliance gap; $80k/year expected loss from not having SOC 2 (deal-blocker on enterprise RFPs); $60k/year expected from client data flowing through personal ChatGPT accounts; $120k/year from procurement gates locked by missing certifications. The single largest event cost shown is $500k (the client-IP-leak tile) — conservative; real 2024-2025 incidents have run much higher.
"One bad day" indicator
Max single-event cost across selected tiles. Honest — that is the worst single thing that could happen from the gap mix you ticked.
What gimmefy doesn't fix
Three tiles flagged as human-only: team security culture, the AI vibe in the room, and client trust over time. The reveal counter honestly reports these as "stay human."
Widget 05Bonus — what your own white-label platform would cost
What's in the tile set
19 representative engineering pieces in four buckets: what your client sees (4 tiles), what lives in their inbox (3 tiles), the trust signals that win deals (4 tiles), the invisible engineering that is the actual product (5 tiles), and what stays your job — selling, consulting, client relationships (3 human-only tiles).
Build costs
Draw on the white-label section 07 evidence — "a standing team of six to twelve, twelve to eighteen months, millions before launch." Per-tile sizing: small UX pieces $15-30k each, trust signals $60-250k each, invisible engineering $180-540k each.
Annual maintenance per piece
15-50% of build cost depending on complexity. Model maintenance is the highest at roughly 67% of build cost because the AI landscape changes weekly.
Engineers shown
Total engineer-allocations across selected pieces, divided by 2 (rough team-overlap factor, rounded up).
Months-to-ship
Longest single piece in the selection. Parallel work assumed across teams.
The big-ticket tile
"40+ AI models, kept current" — build $540k, 12 months, 3 engineers, $360k/year ongoing maintenance. This single tile dwarfs most others and rightly so: it's the actual nightmare of running a model-agnostic AI platform. The pricing reflects what it costs to keep a team continuously integrating provider releases, deprecations, pricing shifts, and quality changes.
Widget 06The reveal — the gimmefy alternative
Partner terms
Setup, licence, usage and support terms are scoped privately after the alignment call.
Usage model
Usage and capacity are mapped privately to expected client activity, capability mix and growth plan.
Usage assumption
500 / 1,000 / 2,500 credits per user per month (Light / Standard / Heavy). Most partners settle around Standard within the first quarter.
The pain total ($3.42M)
Sum of typical 25-person agency year-one figures from Widgets 1-5: stack chaos $150k + context plumbing $220k + custom builds $250k + governance exposure $400k + white-label build cost $2.4M.
What this excludes
Your end-client pricing, packaging, margins and resale strategy remain yours to set.
Honest limitsWhat we deliberately don't quantify
Three things we didn't try to put a number on because an honest answer would mislead.
The cost of a single catastrophic data leak
Public incidents in 2024-2025 ranged from $1 million to $50 million depending on regulator, jurisdiction, and reputational fallout. We use the lower end as the "one bad day" indicator; reality has long tails we can't model from public data alone.
The opportunity cost of 18 months spent building when you could have been selling
Real, large, and agency-specific. We name it qualitatively in the Widget 5 gray-hair tags rather than try to dollarise it.
The value of the relationship between you and your client
Tech doesn't make it. Time does. Always was, always will be.
We're in the messy middle too, sometimes. We just have a better way out. The kettle is on. If you'd like to see it →