What an air-gapped AI estate costs
Published, because a buyer who arrives price-aware is halfway there.
"Contact us for pricing" reads as the price depends on how much we think you'll pay. Every figure on this page is a real band from a real bill of materials, exclusive of 18% GST, which any GST-registered firm recovers as input credit.
The bands
Two figures for every estate, in the same table, at the same weight. The one on the right is the one to read.
| Plan | Profile | One-time | Every year after |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pilot | 1–10 users, eight weeks. A compact machine with 128GB of unified memory, one document corpus of up to 25,000 pages, the full retrieval, document and transcription stack, and a half-day of training for up to ten staff. The machine is yours to keep whether or not you proceed.Credited in full against any plan signed within ninety days. | ₹12 lakh | — |
| Sentinel | 15–40 users. Boutique fund, CA practice, law firm. A workstation-class machine with 192GB of GPU memory. Eight models. No server room — a locked cabinet and a dedicated circuit.Four on-site visits a year, of which two are full model upgrades. Phone support 9×5 for two named administrators. Next-business-day on-site in metros. Return-to-base replacement with a loaner. | ₹80 lakh – ₹1.00 crore | ₹16 lakh |
| Praetorian | 150–400+ users. Rack-scale, redundant, 24×7. Twenty models and more. Requires a real server room, and we decline clients who will not build one.Four full quarterly upgrade visits plus up to two out-of-cycle model drops. Phone support 24×7. Four-hour on-site response in metros. On-site cold spare kit including a spare GPU, and a named regional engineer. Quoted cost-plus, with customs duty as an explicit pass-through line. | ₹5.50 – ₹8.10 crore | ₹85 lakh – ₹1.35 crore |
Below roughly fifteen users the economics do not work, and we will say so at the consultation rather than sell you something small. Between the bands we scope rather than discount: if the number is wrong for you, we will design a smaller estate at the same rate. A discounted security product tells you the security was padding.
Two smaller steps first, both credited in full
Nobody signs a crore of capital expenditure from a web page. Neither step is a formality, and either can end with us telling you not to proceed.
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Consultation — 45 minutes, no charge.
A briefing rather than a sales call. A mutual non-disclosure agreement, pre-signed by us, is attached to the calendar invitation as standard. In roughly a third of cases the recommendation is not to proceed.
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Assessment — ₹3–5 lakh, credited in full.
Two to three weeks. A site survey covering power, earthing, cooling and floor loading; a review of your corpus and where it actually lives; the access model; and written findings containing a section titled What will not work. If the answer is that you are not ready, we say so and hand the work back.
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Pilot — ₹12 lakh, credited in full.
Eight weeks, on your real documents, in your office, with your own people asking their own questions. Credited against any plan signed within ninety days, and the machine is yours either way. Paid deliberately: a free pilot is a demonstration, a paid pilot is a decision.
What the annual figure actually buys
It is not a support contract. It is what keeps a disconnected estate at the frontier.
The annual figure appears in rupees, beside the capital figure, in the same table — not as a percentage, not in a footnote, and not raised once the capital number has been agreed. A cost that arrives late is the fastest way to lose a serious buyer, and it is also how most infrastructure is sold.
Four on-site visits a year
At least two of them install new models, brought in by hand on sealed, hashed media, verified in front of you and benchmarked against your own documents rather than a public leaderboard. You accept them or you decline them.
Phone support for named administrators
9×5 on Sentinel for two named people; 24×7 and unlimited named administrators on Praetorian. On-site response is next business day and four hours respectively, in metros.
A monthly health report
Produced from a diagnostic bundle you generate and you choose to send. It contains telemetry only — no document content, no prompts, no user data — and its exact schema is written into the contract. We cannot see your system and we do not pretend otherwise. We never pull; you always push.
Quarterly model evaluation
New models measured against your own corpus and your own evaluation set. Anything that scores worse than what you already have does not ship, however good its public benchmarks.
Physical service
Dust, filter and thermal service; UPS battery load testing under real load; tamper-seal verification photographed and diffed against the previous visit; spares held to your plan's terms.
An annual air-gap integrity audit
With a written attestation you can hand to a client, an auditor or an insurer. Bi-annual on Praetorian, with a penetration test.
The first year is mandatory and not negotiable. An air-gapped system with no maintenance path is a liability, and we will not create one and walk away. Thereafter it renews annually on a three-year initial term, escalating at 8% a year or CPI plus three, whichever is lower. If it lapses and you want it back, there is a paid recommissioning audit first — ₹6–20 lakh by tier, and we say that at signature rather than at renewal.
Terms, stated before you ask for them
- Payment
- 50% with the order, 40% on delivery to site, 10% on acceptance sign-off. The annual service is invoiced annually in advance, with the first year invoiced alongside the final milestone. The Pilot is 100% with the order.
- Quote validity
- Ten days. Not thirty, not sixty. Memory pricing moved sharply through 2026 and one workstation card rose 55% in sixteen months; a sixty-day quote would be an uninsured position rather than a courtesy.
- Exchange rate
- Re-checked on every quote and printed on the face of it. We place the vendor order within five working days of your order and carry no unhedged price risk on your behalf.
- GST
- 18%, excluded from every figure on this page, and recoverable in full as input tax credit by any GST-registered firm. Your effective cost is the figure shown.
- Customs
- On rack-scale estates, quoted cost-plus with customs duty as an explicit pass-through line. The basic customs duty treatment on this class of hardware is contested, and a fixed price that absorbed it would be a bet rather than a quote.
- Warranty and spares
- The OEM hardware warranty is passed through to you, typically three years, and we manage every return. A loaner or a cold spare is supplied to your plan's terms so you are never down waiting on a replacement.
- Ownership
- You own the hardware, the weights, the retrieval index, the configuration and the documentation. Nothing reports back to us. There is no licence key that expires and no server of ours that has to stay up.
- Discount
- None, at any volume. If the number is wrong for you we will scope a smaller estate at the same rate.
What is explicitly not in our quote
Written down here rather than discovered in month three. Each of these is a genuine cost to you, and none of it is marked up by us.
- Civil, electrical and cooling works. You contract these directly. We will specify them precisely, we will not mark them up, and we will not carry construction risk. On a server-room build they are typically substantial.
- Client-side network and identity infrastructure. Your switches, your directory, your endpoints.
- Data cleansing and document digitisation beyond the page count agreed in the Commissioning Plan.
- Any regulatory certification or legal opinion. We provide the evidence — commissioning report, topology diagram, licence schedule, air-gap attestation. Your counsel provides the opinion. Nobody who sells you a compliance certificate for this is in a position to issue one.
Who should not buy this
We would rather lose the enquiry now than the deal in month five.
- If your work is not confidential, you do not need us and should not buy from us. Keep your cloud subscription. It is a better product for general business use and it is cheaper to start.
- Below roughly fifteen users the arithmetic does not work. We will tell you that at the consultation.
- If you want the hardware only, we will recommend a specification and a vendor at no charge, and decline the work. A box delivered is not an estate installed.
- If your premises cannot take a dedicated circuit and twenty-four-hour cooling, we will find that at the survey and say so before you have spent anything meaningful.
- If a rented GPU in somebody else's data centre would genuinely serve your workload, it is cheaper and you should use it. That rate card competes with your public-cloud spend, not with us.
- If you are a very large organisation with a data centre and a multi-year mandate, a hyperscaler's air-gapped offering or a systems integrator may genuinely be the better fit. We are built for the forty-partner firm, not the twelve-thousand-person one.
The next step is a paid assessment.
Two to three weeks. ₹3–5 lakh, credited in full against deployment. A site survey, a review of your corpus, the access model, and written findings that include what will not work.
Before that there is a forty-five minute consultation, at no charge, with a mutual non-disclosure agreement attached to the invitation. If the honest answer is that this is not right for you, or not right yet, you will hear it in that conversation rather than in month five.
Physics, not promises.