In-product assistant
Very high volume · interactive · latency-sensitive
The always-on helper inside the app, grounded in each tenant’s own data.
Serve every account without support eating the margin.
SMB SaaS wins on volume and loses on cost-to-serve. AI fixed the coverage problem and then handed you a variable bill that scales with exactly the customers you make the least money on.
Your cheapest customers use it most.
An in-product assistant is used hardest by the accounts on your lowest tier. Metered inference turns your best retention feature into a gross-margin problem.
- AI cost sits directly in cost of revenue, in front of every investor
- Long-tail accounts generate the most inference per pound of ARR
- Free trials are pure inference cost with no offsetting revenue
- Customer data across thousands of tenants transits a third party
Both halves of the bill.
ai.yourcompany.com
SaaS companies are usually paying twice: per-seat AI licences for their own staff, and metered inference for the assistant they ship to customers. Both land in the same P&L, and both are addressable.
- Support and success
- Product and design
- Engineering
- Marketing
- Sales
api.ai.yourcompany.com
The metered inference behind the product itself, the workloads below. This is the half that grows with adoption, and the half that repetition makes cheapest to move.
Runvo replaces both, and you get one smaller AI bill.
The workloads that move well.
High-volume and repetitive is the test. These are the shapes that usually clear it in SMB-focused SaaS.
Onboarding & activation
High volume · repetitive · scripted
Guide a new account to first value without a human touch.
Ticket deflection
Very high volume · retrieval-heavy
Answer from the docs and the account’s own state before a ticket is created.
Lifecycle outreach
Batch · scheduled · non-interactive
Usage-triggered nudges, drafted per account rather than per segment.
Docs & knowledge Q&A
Very high volume · cacheable · repetitive
The same few thousand questions, answered thousands of times a day.
The same workload, priced twice.
Where AI cost lands
Cost of revenue, variable
Infrastructure, fixed
Cost of a free trial
Metered, unrecovered
Marginal, near zero
Long-tail accounts
Cost more than they pay
Amortised over capacity
Tenant data
Leaves the perimeter
Never leaves it
Cost shape
Per token, uncapped
Provisioned capacity, fixed
Gross margin as usage grows
Compresses
Holds
Illustrative. Which of these hold for you depends on your volumes, quality bar and latency targets. That is what the assessment establishes.
Fixed
Cost of running it
One monthly figure, sized to the workload.
Fixed
AI line in cost of revenue
A number you can forecast.
Held
Gross margin at scale
Usage growth stops compressing it.
What we treat as non-negotiable.
Multi-tenant isolation
Tenant separation is designed in at the infrastructure layer, not assumed from a provider’s terms of service.
It has to be worth it
A workload that runs a handful of times a week does not need infrastructure of its own, and Runvo says so rather than selling one.
Fully managed
Migration, deployment, optimisation, scaling, monitoring and maintenance are Runvo’s job, not a new hire’s.
Tell us what you run in SMB-focused SaaS.
We start from your real traffic (volumes, prompt shapes, quality bars and latency targets) and tell you which workloads are worth moving. If none of them are, we say so.
Talk to Runvo
Tell us the size of the firm and what your client contracts require.