AI Savings & Seat Sizing Calculator
Two modes, matching the two ways VDF AI is licensed. Cloud is a managed subscription on flat plans from $0 to $50 per seat a month. On-premises is Seat Licensing — fixed annual Seat Bundles in which every seat includes the full platform, with API calls added through packs. Below: how each mode calculates, what the assumptions are, and how to embed the tool.
Live calculator
Same build as the standalone file — switch tabs to move between the two licensing models.
Cloud subscription mode
VDF AI Cloud is a managed subscription on flat plans. Six inputs: team size, and five monthly spend lines (LLM API, agent/orchestration, ML/evaluation, chat/productivity seats, other tooling). The five lines are summed and annualized (×12) into current annual spend.
Which rate to enter
Professional lists at US$50 per seat a month, the plan for teams of up to 20; larger teams move to Enterprise Cloud, which is quoted. Enter that rate or your quote in the currency you selected — the tool does not convert currencies. Either way it reports the break-even rate — your annualized stack spend divided by users and by twelve. That is the number a CFO actually needs: any per-user rate below it consolidates the stack at lower cost than the status quo.
Four plans are shown for context — Free ($0, one user), Starter ($20 a month for up to three users), Professional ($50 per seat a month, up to 20 seats), and Enterprise Cloud (annual, scoped to your rollout). Yearly billing on Starter and Professional costs about 17% less. The comparison is deliberately about consolidation: a multi-vendor stack of cloud APIs, orchestration tooling, an ML platform, and copilot seats, versus one governed platform.
Model-provider token spend and the infrastructure running the models stay separate in every scenario. Routing efficiency is modeled in the on-premises tab, not here, so the two effects are never double-counted.
On-premises Seat Licensing mode
On-premises VDF AI is licensed by seat, in fixed annual Seat Bundles — Essential, Foundation, Growth, Scale and Enterprise. Every seat includes the full platform, with unlimited agents and workflows. There are two licensed units, and they are independent: seats for people-driven, interactive work and API calls for system-driven work. The mode runs in three steps.
Step 1 — seats
Enter the named users who will work in VDF AI interactively, and the growth you expect over
the term. A seat belongs to one named individual and is not shared; it can be reassigned
when its holder leaves or changes role. Growth is rounded up to blocks of 10,
because that is how seats are added during a term.
Step 2 — API calls
An API call is one inbound programmatic request — an API call, a scheduled job execution, or a triggered workflow — counted once regardless of the processing inside it. The tool sums those per day, adds one call per 100 batch records or part thereof, and annualizes over the days automation actually runs. API access is not included by default in the Essential to Scale bundles; it is added through API Expansion Packs, so a team that only works interactively leaves this step at zero and never pays for API capacity.
Step 3 — the deployment profile
The results show seats to license, annual API calls, and the shape of the deployment. Interactive deployments need seats only — no API Expansion Packs. Automated deployments such as fraud scoring, integration hubs, and straight-through processing need a few seats for the team that builds and runs the agents, plus API Expansion Packs for the volume. Mixed deployments need both. Very large seat counts and API volumes are usually best served by the Enterprise bundle, which includes unlimited seats and unlimited API calls. The tool deliberately does not map your numbers to a named bundle — that recommendation comes out of the sizing workshop.
What is never measured
Interactive sessions by seat holders; model tokens, which the VDF AI licence does not meter; governance and policy evaluation, audit logging, and compliance reporting; administration, configuration, monitoring, and health checks; retrieval from an existing index inside a counted call; failed requests and automatic retries within 60 seconds of a failure. A streamed response counts once, at the request that initiated it.
The economics panel
Two independent effects. Tool consolidation: one VDF AI seat carries the full platform, so it can replace several per-seat AI tools for each user — and the growth slider from Step 1 shows what those tools would cost by the end of the term as adoption grows. Separately, routing and consolidation reduce what the infrastructure underneath costs to run: energy (your 30–65% routing band), DevOps and ML engineering 45%, model evaluation 80%, orchestration licences 60%, downtime and incidents 50%, and no modeled reduction on the "other" line.
Each row ties a mechanism to a percentage so finance can audit the logic rather than accept a headline. The VDF AI Seat Bundle itself is a separate fixed annual line, agreed in a sizing workshop before the term starts rather than invoiced after it — pricing is provided on request, in the workshop, or through an authorized VDF AI partner. The output here is an estimate to bring to that workshop, not a quote.
Embed the calculator
The tool is a single self-contained file with no external dependencies. Drop this iframe into any page:
The frame posts its own height to the parent window as it recalculates, so a host page can
size it exactly by listening for a vdf-calc-height message rather than
guessing a fixed height.