Pricing pages list numbers. They rarely show you what you are already spending.
Before you read the tier table, here is the baseline cost of not having a team memory layer — the cost that exists whether or not you buy anything.
The onboarding tax: $3,000 per hire
When a new developer joins your team, the first four to six weeks are expensive in a specific way. They do not know the history. They ask senior engineers questions that were already answered in a Slack thread eight months ago — questions about why the auth service is structured the way it is, why you chose that database, why that one endpoint behaves differently.
A conservative estimate: if a senior engineer earning $120,000/year spends 15% of their time in the first month answering onboarding questions, that is $1,500 in distracted senior time per new hire. Add the productivity drag on the new hire themselves and the number reaches $3,000 easily. That figure assumes a single hire. Most agencies run this cost two or three times per year.
Accord Book gives new hires read access to the project. They ask the project, not your senior dev. The history is there — who made the decision, when, why, and what alternatives were considered.
The sync meeting tax: 200 hours a year
Four client status calls per week at one hour each is 200 hours a year. At a blended team rate of $100/hour, that is $20,000 of unbilled time — not billable because you are not producing anything, you are reporting on what you produced.
That number is probably conservative for a mid-size agency. It does not count the internal standups, the re-alignment meetings, the "just a quick sync" calls that stack up across projects.
The underlying problem is not that clients want updates. It is that updates are not available on demand — they require someone to compile them manually. Accord Book extracts project status continuously from Slack and Git activity. A client with portal access can query project state at any time without pulling a team member out of flow.
Decision fatigue: the uncountable cost
Decision fatigue is real. Research on it dates back to the 1990s and has been replicated across domains from judges to surgeons to software teams. The core finding: the quality of decisions degrades as the number of decisions made in a day accumulates.
What makes this especially expensive for software teams is that many of the decisions being made are not new. They are repeats. The team decided the caching strategy in Q2. By Q4, the original context is gone, the engineer who made the call has moved on, and the team spends two hours relitigating a decision that already has a correct answer documented nowhere.
Accord Book logs decisions with full provenance — who said it, which meeting or thread it came from, and when. When the same question comes up again, it takes thirty seconds to retrieve the original rationale. The two-hour meeting does not happen.
What Accord Book actually costs
Studio (small agency, up to ~8 people): $5,500/year + $1,500 one-time setup. Founding-cohort price: $3,300 Year 1.
Agency (mid-size): $13,500/year + $2,500 one-time setup. Founding-cohort price: $8,100 Year 1.
No per-seat charges. No usage metering. You bring your own API keys — your LLM spend goes directly to Anthropic or OpenAI under your account. We never see it.
If you run one hire per year and four client calls per week, the baseline costs above — $3,000 in onboarding tax, $20,000 in unbilled sync time — sum to $23,000. The subscription does not need to eliminate all of that to pay for itself. It needs to recover a fraction of it.
The founding pilot
We are currently accepting three founding-cohort deployments. The pilot is six to eight weeks, assisted setup included, at no charge. Founding pricing locks in at signing and does not change.
Three spots. See what the pilot includes →