How do I pay only for the AI work my team actually used?
Buy in the shape of your usage. Review the receipt and actual deliverable before accepting a handover.
"Only pay for what you used" fails most often at the contract layer: a team with four real work days a week buys the always-on tier in January optimism and donates the difference all year. The correction is measurement before commitment, and the records make the measurement free: the job index already knows which days the team did recorded client work, because that is what an index is. Count the days, in the worksheet pattern this cluster uses, and the right tier usually names itself.
The Day Pass exists for the measured middle: real, consequential work that does not happen daily. A pass day covers the whole team's recorded work for 24 hours at $0.99, with the same receipts and handovers as any tier, because evidence quality is not a pricing lever here. Teams commonly run a hybrid without noticing it is one: passes during project crunches, the free tier between them, and a Pass subscription only in the quarters where the day-count says daily.
Review the count quarterly against the records, not against impressions. Usage drifts upward quietly as agents join workflows; the quarter where passes cost more than the subscription is visible in the index a month before it is visible in the budget, which is the correct order for those two discoveries.
Worksheet: the team's true usage count
1. Pull last quarter's job index; mark the days with recorded team work. 2. Count them per month. Under roughly fifteen a month: Day Pass arithmetic wins; at near-daily: the Pass wins. 3. Price both shapes at live figures ($0.99 per day; $29 monthly; $290 yearly; See pricing holder monthly) and write the difference down. 4. Check for silent waste: subscriptions on surfaces the records show untouched for a full quarter. 5. Decide, record the decision and its count in the index notes, and calendar the next quarterly recount. Rule: the count comes from records, never from asking the team how busy it felt.
Worked example
Sample: a four-person team with nine recorded work days in a month pays $8.91 in Day Passes for full record coverage of those days. The same team in a launch month with twenty-three work days pays $22.77 per-day or $29 flat; the worksheet's quarterly count, not a sales conversation, is what tells them the launch pattern has become the normal pattern. (Sample figures computed from the live prices.)
Frequently asked questions
Does one Day Pass cover the whole team for the day?
The pass covers the pass holder's work for 24 hours. Team arrangements follow the pricing page's current terms; the worksheet's job is to establish your usage shape first, because the right team configuration is priced from the shape, not guessed before it.
Will switching tiers strand our records?
No. Records accumulate in one place across free days, pass days, and subscription periods. The evidence chain does not break at billing boundaries, which is a design requirement here, not a courtesy.
How do we stop individuals buying duplicate personal tiers?
The quarterly recount doubles as the audit: list every AI subscription the business pays, match each against the records of work it produced, and consolidate the ones whose work already runs through the team's connection. Duplication survives on invisibility; the count removes it.
By Brennan Zambo, founder of Zambo.
Last verified: 2026-10-17.
Try a handover
A handover gives your client one proof link with verifiable receipts to review, then Accept or Flag.
try it: say 'use zambo to hand this over to <client>' in your ai