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Cost and spend

The Cost page shows what Business-Gym spends running your AI work, month to date, broken down several ways. It is the platform’s running cost — the model calls behind your automations — and it is not your subscription invoice and not your own business revenue.

You will find it under Measure, next to Impact and the Audit log.

What is counted, and what is not

Section titled “What is counted, and what is not”

Counted: the model calls behind workflow steps, the assistant you chat with, and the scheduled ticks your heads run on their own. Each charge is recorded as it happens, with the model that produced it.

Not counted: the work of reading inbound mail. Classifying an arriving message and drafting a reply do consume model calls, but nothing on the inbound path records what they cost, so that spend is absent from this page entirely. If you are trying to work out what a busy mailbox costs you, this page cannot answer it yet — that is covered under revenue and invoices.

Why the by-capability breakdown can total less than your spend

Section titled “Why the by-capability breakdown can total less than your spend”

This is the one number on the page most likely to alarm you, and the explanation is dull. The breakdown groups spend by the kind of AI work behind it — drafting, summarising, extracting, translating, classifying — and only charges the system can confidently attribute appear there.

Two kinds are left out on purpose:

  • Spend recorded before the breakdown existed. Older charges carry no record of which kind of work produced them, so they are excluded rather than guessed at. In practice the chart starts sparse and fills in as new work runs.
  • Steps that are not AI calls at all — sending an email, writing a record. They cost nothing to a model and belong in no capability.

Spend is also grouped by feature — automations, the assistant, scheduled ticks — and charges recorded before that grouping existed are shown honestly as unattributed rather than being assigned to a feature that may not have caused them.

What the hours-saved and ROI figures mean

Section titled “What the hours-saved and ROI figures mean”

They are estimates, and you should know how they are built before you quote them. The page reports a human-time-saved figure and a net-ROI figure for the month.

The hours figure is your run volume multiplied by a fixed assumption about how long each run would have taken a person. The ROI figure applies an assumed hourly rate to that result and subtracts what the platform actually spent.

So: the run count and the spend are recorded facts; the minutes-per-run and the hourly rate are settings. The figure moves when your volume moves — and it also moves if someone changes the assumption. Treat it as a directional indicator. It is not a measurement of anyone’s time, and it should not go in front of a board or an auditor without that sentence attached.

What does not work on this page yet

Section titled “What does not work on this page yet”

We would rather you heard this here than discovered it while trying to make a decision.

  • The by-head breakdown under-attributes. Automation spend is not yet labelled with the head that caused it, so nearly all of it collects in a single Other bar. A quiet head is not evidence it is cheap — the attribution simply is not there.
  • The period selector does not filter. Changing it does not change what you are looking at. The page always shows the current month to date.
  • The legal-entity card is empty, and there is no working budget-setting control on this page. Caps are set in Settings — see below.

How do I cap what Business-Gym spends?

Section titled “How do I cap what Business-Gym spends?”

Two caps are real and they live outside this page. A company-wide daily and monthly cap sit in Settings, and each head can carry its own daily budget on its Configure tab.

What each one actually stops — and the one that records a number without enforcing it — is written up on automations and admin, because that is where you set them.

Where should I go next?

Section titled “Where should I go next?”