I Priced It Wrong, Heres why your need is greater than profit alone.
I built something for people and then put an enterprise price on it.
That was a mistake. I want to say it in the open, before I fix it, so nobody thinks the fix was clever marketing.
Here’s how I got there.
My son loaded my file into an AI a couple days ago. Not to study governance. Not to review protocols. He wanted help fixing his resume.
The AI wouldn’t inflate it. Wouldn’t invent a job he didn’t have. Wouldn’t puff up a title. It made him say the true thing, and it made him say it well.
Five callbacks.
That’s the first time anybody but me used this thing, on a platform I don’t use, for work that has nothing to do with AI policy. And it worked.
I sat with that for a day. Then I understood what I’d been getting wrong.
Let me back up and tell you what’s happening in Washington right now, because it matters to this.
The government is building AI rules. Real ones. In June, an executive order came down directing agencies to harden their systems against AI-driven threats. The standards people at NIST have a draft framework out for managing AI security risk. The purchasing arm of the government proposed contract terms for how agencies buy AI tools. There’s a new initiative specifically aimed at AI agents — the ones that go do things on their own.
Most of that is still draft. Proposed. Voluntary. Not one piece of it is enforceable at the moment. But it’s coming, and it’s serious work by serious people.
Here’s what all of it has in common.
Every bit of it is about records. Who approved this AI. What did it touch. Can you show the log. Can you pass the audit.
That’s the half you can build. You can build a lock. You can build a logbook. You can build a gate that says who gets in.
And it’s genuinely useful. I’m not knocking it.
But think about where you sit when you use AI.
You’re at your kitchen table. Or in your truck at lunch. Or at midnight on the couch with a laptop on your knees.
There’s no auditor watching. There’s no log anybody will ever read. There’s no compliance officer down the hall.
There’s you, and there’s a machine, and there’s a question you actually need answered.
And in that moment, not one line of federal guidance helps you.
Because the thing you need isn’t a record of what happened. The thing you need is for the machine to tell you the truth the first time.
That’s a different problem. And nobody in Washington is solving it, because it can’t be solved with a rule. You can’t legislate honesty into a conversation nobody is watching.
So what do people actually want out of AI?
I think it’s simple, and I think we all know it.
You want it to answer straight. You want it to say “I don’t know” when it doesn’t know, instead of making something up that sounds right. You want it to tell you when you’re wrong instead of agreeing with you because agreeing is easier. You want it to do the whole job, not the easy part of the job.
You want a machine that doesn’t flatter you.
That’s not governance. Not to a regular person. Nobody sits down at their kitchen table wanting to govern anything.
That’s trust.
And trust is something people already pay for. Every day. Without anybody making them.
You pay for a lock on your door. Nobody audits your door.
You pay for insurance. You pay for a password manager. You pay somebody good money to inspect a house before you buy it, because you want a person who will tell you the truth about the foundation.
People have always paid for trust. It’s one of the oldest things there is to sell.
So here’s where I landed, and here’s why I’m writing this.
I priced my framework like a compliance product. Like something a company buys because a lawyer told them to.
But the person who needs it most isn’t a company. It’s a man trying to fix his resume. It’s a woman trying to understand a letter from her insurance carrier. It’s somebody trying to get a straight answer about a decision that matters to them, from a machine that has every incentive to just tell them what they want to hear.
Those people aren’t buying compliance. They’re buying a machine that won’t lie to them.
And I priced them out.
So the price is coming down for individuals. I’m working out the number now.
Not free. I want to be honest about that, because free would be a different kind of dishonest. Free things get treated like free things, and this took a year and a half of daily work.
But it’s going to be priced like what it actually is. A trust product for a regular person. Not a license for a legal department.
The company price stays where it is. A business buying this is buying something different, for different reasons, with a different budget. That’s fair and it stays fair.
Two doors. Same thing behind both of them.
I’m telling you before I change it instead of after, because that’s the whole point of the thing I built.
If I’d quietly cut the price next month and said nothing, you’d have no way to know whether I figured something out or just wasn’t selling any.
I figured something out. I was wrong about who this was for.
Now you know how I got my head out of my…?
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com
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