Investment & Value
Start with a focused paid pilot. Plan implementation and an annual engagement around your client workflows. Commercial details come in a scoped proposal.
What an internal team costs
An illustrative U.S. annual budget for four full-time roles: a technical lead, integrations engineer, cloud engineer and security engineer.
Planning example. Your staffing needs, salaries and time allocated depend on scope.Compare with your own team →
| Role | Responsibility | Base salary | 30% employer overhead | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Technical lead / architect | Architecture, isolation, technical ownership | $200,000 | $60,000 | $260,000 |
| Backend / integrations engineer | Connectors, authentication, APIs, credential handling | $150,000 | $45,000 | $195,000 |
| Cloud / reliability engineer | Infrastructure, deployments, monitoring, recovery | $150,000 | $45,000 | $195,000 |
| Security engineer | Policies, threat modeling, audit controls, security testing | $160,000 | $48,000 | $208,000 |
| Total | Four full-time roles, allocation not specified | $660,000 | $198,000 | $858,000 |
A broad senior engineering role is a separate reference: $220,000 base plus $66,000 overhead, $286,000 per year.
Neither reference shows how many gateways these people could build or operate, or whether they would work on this full time. People contribute far more than this one workload.
The 30% employer overhead is this model’s own planning assumption. Do not count paid leave twice inside annual salaries. Treat taxes, benefits and contractor fees the same way on both sides, and do not add overhead twice.
May 2025 median annual pay $135,980; highest 10% above $214,670.
May 2025 median annual pay $129,180.
June 2026, private industry: wages $32.82 per hour and benefits $14.07 per hour, about 42.9% of wages. The 30% overhead used here is a planning assumption, not this ratio.
These statistics give context. They are not quotes for specific roles.
The engagement
Step 1
Step 2 · one-time
Step 3 · recurring
Your proposal shows the one-time implementation and the recurring subscription separately, and applies the pilot credit once. Final terms are set by the signed order form. This page is not an offer or a quote.
Same-scope cost comparison
Compare the recurring cost of operating access infrastructure yourself with the recurring cost of AAG, for the same client gateways and the same requirements.
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What sets the investment
The subscription is not metered by user, AI identity, connector instance or request.
The recurring subscription is set by how many client gateways you run at the same time.
The one-time fee depends on how many gateways are deployed and whether any work falls outside standard scope.
Supported connectors are part of standard scope. A new connector type or custom integration is scoped separately.
Large estates, dedicated topology, private connectivity, region or support requirements are discussed in the proposal.
Value as your client base grows
As your client base grows, the work extends beyond connecting another account. Permissions change, integrations need maintenance, and access needs to remain traceable. AAG provides dedicated client gateways and a common access model, giving your team a foundation for building useful client workflows.
Every client gets its own gateway, with its own credentials and permissions. A new client does not widen access to existing ones.
Onboarding, credential rotation, suspension and offboarding are the same gateway operations for client 10 and client 100.
Access decisions are recorded against the client boundary they happened in, so an investigation or security review starts from one client’s record.
Your engineers build client workflows on connector operations AAG maintains, instead of maintaining the access layer underneath.
| Responsibility | Internal platform | With AAG |
|---|---|---|
| Per-client isolation model | Design, implement and test it yourself | Provided: one gateway per client, sessions bound to one gateway |
| Credential custody | Choose storage, encryption and who can decrypt | Provided: single-use intake and encrypted custody behind the execution path |
| Authorization and cross-client denial | Build and maintain policy checks on every request | Provided: checked before execution, refusals recorded |
| Audit evidence | Define, store and query access records | Provided: hash-chained audit records you can query by client |
| Connector maintenance | Track provider API changes for every connector | Provided for supported connector types |
| Client lifecycle | Script onboarding, rotation, suspension and offboarding | Provided as gateway operations |
| Client authorization and credential ownership | Your team | Still your team: each client authorizes access and names a credential owner |
| Workflows and client services | Your team | Still your team: AAG supplies access, not the finished service |
An established internal platform can support many clients with modest extra labor. Existing staff, contractors or other platforms may already cover part of this work. At larger gateway counts, an internal approach can cost the same as AAG or less.
The benefits above can still matter at that scale, but they are reasons to compare, not proof that the investment suits every agency. An agency with a mature, well-run platform may gain less.
Agency value scenario
AAG supplies access infrastructure. Your agency designs, sells and delivers any new service. Use your own assumptions; potential revenue and staff capacity are kept apart.
Uses the client gateway count and quote from the cost comparison above.
The sample shows how the calculator works. Replace it with your own figures.
Annual employee cost = salary × (1 + employer overhead) × allocation. Contractor cost = annual fee × allocation. Internal recurring cost includes both, plus infrastructure and other recurring expenses.
The AAG side includes 12 × your monthly quote, retained labor and recurring expenses. Estimated cost difference = 100 × (internal cost − AAG-side cost) / internal cost, only when internal cost is positive. One-time costs stay separate. Your estimate can be negative; it stays in your browser.
Tell us the workflow, the client accounts involved and roughly how many clients you serve. The proposal sets out the pilot, implementation and subscription for that scope.