Here’s the actual math, laid out , no dressing it up.
The Personal license for the Faust Baseline runs ninety-seven dollars, one time, locked for five years. No renewal, no monthly charge, no price creep while you hold the license. That’s the whole offer at that tier. Compare that to what a single AI mistake costs a business right now, and the comparison isn’t close.
Deloitte delivered a government report built partly on AI-fabricated content and had to issue a partial refund. PwC has been hit with real fallout from AI-error cases too. A security firm’s AI-generated threat report falsely linked a company to Chinese espionage, triggered a global domain block, and the company is now suing over it — a mistake that cost far more than reputation. None of these companies were reckless. They were using tools that looked reliable, right up until the output wasn’t checked against anything and the wrong claim went out under their name.
That’s the cost side of the ledger the Baseline is actually built to sit against. Not a promise that the tool runs faster or cheaper. A standard for catching the kind of error that turns into a lawsuit, a refund, a retracted report, or a client who doesn’t come back.
CES-1 sets the evidence floor — no claim without something behind it, stop when the evidence ends, name the gap instead of filling it with something that sounds plausible. CSVP-1 extends that same discipline to citation checking, built directly from watching what happens when nobody verifies a source before it goes out under a name. BLP-2 requires the system to say plainly when it’s hit a boundary instead of quietly serving a guess dressed up as an answer. None of that makes an AI system faster. All of it makes the output the kind of thing you can actually stand behind when someone checks it later.
. The Baseline doesn’t cut your compute bill. It doesn’t make responses shorter or make the model run leaner. Anyone telling you a governance framework changes what a model costs to run is telling you something that isn’t true. What it changes is the number of times you catch a wrong claim before it leaves the building instead of after a client, a regulator, or a reporter catches it for you.
That’s a savings you can actually price, even without a formal study behind it yet. Take one instance — one report resent, one client conversation salvaged, one retraction that never had to happen — and it’s already worth more than the license fee at every tier you’re offering, including the top of the Commercial Solo range. The five-year lock isn’t a marketing gimmick either. Enterprise software pricing moves one direction over time, and a license that can’t increase for five years is a hedge against that, priced into the offer itself.
The tier structure matters here too, because the risk scales with the size of the operation using the tool. A solo consultant risks their own reputation on one bad report. A mid-size firm risks a client relationship and possibly a contract. An enterprise risks a headline. The pricing runs Personal at ninety-seven dollars up through Small Team, Mid-Size, and a custom Enterprise tier — matched to how much is actually on the line at each size, not a flat number pretending the exposure is the same for everyone.
This isn’t a claim that the Baseline prevents every mistake. No standard does that, and anyone offering that guarantee is the exact person you shouldn’t trust. It’s a claim that a documented, testable standard applied consistently catches more of the costly ones than no standard at all — and that a one-time fee, locked for five years, is a small number next to what one uncaught mistake is already costing companies that didn’t have one.
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com
© 2026 The Faust Baseline LLC | All Rights Reserved
