Assess · Healthcheck
Token cost-yield audit
Token cost-yield audit across your AI applications.
1 week
Discuss this starting pointCost Intelligence Performance Efficiency (via Token Yield)
Stater
Every token has a cost face and a yield face. Cost is what you pay. Yield is what you got back — the unit of work the application performed for it. Most teams measure the first and ignore the second, then wonder why the bill keeps doubling.
Stater is the framework for AI token economics — a registry of cost-and-yield instrumentation, a measurement discipline, a maturity model, and an optimiser pattern. It treats your AI applications as a portfolio with a per-unit return.
Most teams have a working RAG pipeline. What they don't have is an answer to the question your CFO is about to ask: "what did each token buy us, and was it worth it?" Stater gives you that answer in numbers, not adjectives.
How it works
The framework
Stater has four parts: a body of knowledge, a maturity model, a registry and metering pattern, and an optimiser surface. Treat them as a stack.
Body of Knowledge
The conceptual layer — definitions, units, anti-patterns. What counts as a "unit of work." How to map token spend to business outputs. How to avoid the cost-only trap. The BoK is public and lives in the VOF body of knowledge.
The maturity model
Five levels from billed but invisible through continuously optimised. Each level has a self-assessment, a set of practices, and a graduation criterion. The Token Economics Audit Worksheet maps your current state onto the model.
The registry and metering pattern
Instrumentation guidance — what to label, what to ship to your observability stack, how to attribute spend to features rather than endpoints. The registry is a schema; the metering pattern is an architecture sketch you adapt to your stack.
Token Yield — the Performance Efficiency face
Stater is primarily a Cost Intelligence framework — but token economics has two faces, and the second one (work performed per token spent) is a Performance Efficiency question. Token Yield is Stater's name for that face. The same instrumentation that measures cost measures yield; the optimiser pattern minimises cost or maximises yield depending on which lever your team has to pull this quarter.
Buy a starting point
Three ways to start
Plan · Plan
Registry + metering + optimiser design
Stater registry + metering plan + optimiser design.
2–3 weeks
Discuss this starting pointExecute · Execute
Build, instrument, hand over
Build the optimiser, instrument the apps, hand over to team.
4–12 weeks
Discuss this starting pointTake it with you