Why We’re Re-Thinking How AI-Powered Security Is Priced
Every business running on data and compute is feeling the same squeeze right now, and Refraime is no exception.
IT hardware costs keep climbing. Global supply constraints, currency pressure, and demand from the AI boom itself mean the servers, sensors, and edge devices our industry depends on cost more every year – not less. At the same time, the compute behind computer vision analytics is energy-hungry, and energy costs globally are on anything but a downward trend. Add rising cloud infrastructure pricing on top of that, and the honest picture is this: the underlying cost of delivering AI-powered video analytics is going up, for everyone in this space.
We could pass that straight through. Many providers will, quietly, in the next round of renewals. We’ve chosen not to take the easy road.
Instead, we’ve spent the last few months interrogating our own model from the ground up – asking a harder question than “how do we protect margin,” and asking instead: “how do we protect our clients from a cost environment they didn’t create, without asking them to compromise on the coverage, the intelligence, or the service levels they rely on us for?”
That’s led us to some genuinely exciting thinking internally. Without giving away the detail just yet, we’re exploring smarter, more flexible ways to structure how clients access and pay for our platform – moving away from one-size-fits-all pricing toward models that reflect how our clients actually use their systems. The goal isn’t a smaller bill dressed up differently. It’s a structure that’s fairer, more transparent, and built to absorb exactly the kind of input-cost pressure we’re all facing – so our clients don’t have to.
Why This Should Matter to the People Watching the Line Items
If you’re the one who has to explain next year’s security spend to your board or exco, here’s the part that should get your attention: most pricing models in this industry weren’t built to ask whether the client was actually getting more value out of every Rand spent, or whether the bill was climbing faster than the risk it was covering and that’s what we’re trying to challenge now. A pricing model should be something you can plan around with confidence – not something you brace for at renewal.
What We Mean by “Fairer”
Fairer doesn’t mean cheaper for the sake of it. It means the bill should track something a client can actually see and control, coupled with sound optimisation and ongoing maintenance. It means transparency about what’s driving cost, instead of a single number with no explanation behind it. And it means we absorb the input-cost volatility that’s genuinely ours to manage, rather than passing our forecasting risk onto your budget.
This matters because the temptation in moments like this is to protect the provider first and the client second. We think that’s backwards. If we do our job well, our clients should barely notice the macro pressure we’re navigating on their behalf. That’s the standard we’re holding ourselves to.
We’ll be sharing more with our client base directly in the coming weeks as this takes shape – this isn’t a policy announcement, it’s a heads-up that one is coming, and that it’s been built with genuine care rather than knee-jerk cost-cutting.
For now, the short version: input costs are rising across our industry. We’re not pretending otherwise, and we’re not going to let that quietly become your problem.
Watch this space…
Refraime builds intelligent security platforms that don’t just analyse video. They monitor the health and reliability of the entire surveillance ecosystem. To learn more about our Proudly South African business, contact us at hello@refraime.ai.
Author: Craig Valjalo
Refraime’s CFO
