Pricing
Institution-wide pricing. Not a per-seat bill that grows every year.
AI adoption should not be rationed by licence count. Merzal AI is priced as an institutional platform, scoped to institution type, size and deployment model.
Tiers
Three ways to start
Most institutions begin with a department pilot and move to an institution licence once the success criteria have been met.
Department Pilot
No licence fee
Scoped pilot, one department
- One department in scope
- Document ingestion included
- Staff training session
- Success criteria agreed up front
Institution
Annual platform fee
Whole college, unlimited named users
- All modules included
- Unlimited students and faculty
- Private cloud or hybrid
- Named deployment engineer
Sovereign
Custom
On-premise, multi-campus
- Fully on-premise deployment
- Multi-campus and multi-faculty scope
- Institution owns the stack
- Priority engineering support
The pricing model
Why the meter is enrolment, not accounts
How software is priced decides how it gets used. Per-seat licensing does not just cost more at institutional scale — it changes who is allowed to benefit from it.
A per-seat bill makes adoption a cost decision
When every additional user has a price, someone has to decide which departments deserve a licence. The institution ends up rationing the tool it just bought, and the people left out are usually the administrative staff carrying the heaviest routine load.
Enrolment is a number you already plan around
Student intake is budgeted, forecast and known a year ahead. Billing against it means the AI line item behaves like every other institutional cost rather than drifting with however many accounts were created last term.
Faculty and staff cost nothing to add
They are included, so widening the rollout is a scope decision rather than a procurement round. The platform gets more useful as more of the institution uses it, and nothing about the bill argues against that.
The value does not stop when the contract does
The institution owns its documents, index and embeddings and keeps them in an open format. You are paying to build institutional memory, not renting access to your own records.
Cost calculator
Model your institution before you commit a rupee
Planning estimates, not a quote. On-premise pricing is per enrolled student, with faculty, staff and all modules included. Your final price is scoped after a technical review.
Configure your institution
Model your AI cost before you commit
Priced per enrolled student — faculty, staff and every module included. Planning estimates, not a quote.
The only figure you are billed on.
Included at no additional cost
Per-seat pricing is costed for all 2,680 people on campus, because that is the coverage Merzal AI gives you. Licensing a smaller group is a cheaper bill for a smaller platform, not the same thing bought two ways.
Your projection
Per-seat licensing
$804,000
per year · 2,680 seats at $25/user/month
Grows with every person you add, and stops the day you stop paying.
Merzal AI · institution-wide
94%
Lower than per-seat licensing
$759,000 kept every year — with all 2,680 people on campus still covered.
$1.50 per student / month · $45,000 a year
How this differs
What you pay for
Per-seat: A paid seat for each of 2,680
Merzal AI: 2,500 students — staff included free
Cost as you grow
Per-seat: Rises with every seat added
Merzal AI: Flat, per enrolled student
Where your data lives
Per-seat: The vendor's infrastructure
Merzal AI: Inside your campus network
If the contract ends
Per-seat: Access stops, nothing remains
Merzal AI: You keep the index and documents
On-premise deployment
The platform runs inside your network perimeter. Nothing leaves the campus, and the institution owns its index, documents and embeddings.
Comparison uses published list pricing and excludes education discounts, which vary by institution. No institution licenses AI campus-wide today — this models what matching Merzal AI's coverage would cost. Server sizing is scoped separately.
Scope
What the fee covers, and what it does not
The second list matters more than the first. A price that hides its exclusions is not really a price.
Included in the platform fee
- Every module, for every deployment tier
- Unlimited students, faculty and staff accounts
- Document ingestion, including OCR of printed and handwritten records
- Role mapping onto your actual institutional hierarchy
- Staff training for the people who will use it daily
- A named deployment engineer
Scoped separately, and why
Server sizing
On-premise hardware is scoped separately after a technical review, because sizing follows peak concurrency rather than headcount. Quoting it before we know your peak would be a guess dressed as a number.
Your final price
The calculator is a planning estimate, not a quote. The figure that matters is scoped after a technical review of your institution, deployment model and document volume.
Education discounts on the comparison
The per-seat figures we compare against use published list pricing and exclude education discounts, which vary by institution. If you have negotiated rates, use those instead — the shape of the argument does not change.
Which deployment model you choose changes the sizing conversation more than the licence — compare on-premise, hybrid and private cloud.
Pricing questions
What finance asks before it signs
Direct answers, including the ones that are less flattering to us.
Why is the price set per student when students are not the main users?
Because it is the one number an institution can predict and plan around, not because students consume the most. Faculty, staff and every module are included at no additional cost — enrolment is purely the billing meter.
What does the pilot actually cost?
A department pilot carries no licence fee. It covers one department in scope, document ingestion, a staff training session and success criteria agreed up front, so there is a defined answer to whether it worked before anyone commits to a licence.
Does the bill grow as more people start using it?
No. The fee is institution-wide and billed against enrolment, so switching the platform on for another department does not change it. That is the substantive difference from per-seat licensing, where cost rises with every account.
What happens to our knowledge base if we stop paying?
The institution keeps it. Your documents, index and embeddings belong to you and are exportable in an open format at any time, without negotiation. In an on-premise deployment they are already on your own hardware.