Business Model | Intactus Docs

Company Type

Profitable small business (bootstrapped or minimally funded). Not targeting venture scale. Optimizing for sustainable revenue and high margins, not hypergrowth.

Revenue comes from two streams: a fixed platform subscription and per-case AI operations billed at fixed per-operation prices. This separates the cheap operations (storage, ingestion, search) from the expensive ones (LLM-powered analysis and agent compute) and ensures margin grows with usage.

Layer 1: Platform Subscription (Fixed, Per-Attorney)

Tier	Price	Includes
Vault	$99/month per attorney	Evidence capture, preservation, hashing, manifest, full-text search, timeline, case organization, 8 report types (Case Timeline, Annotated Timeline, Evidence Index, Entity Map, Evidence Ledger, Vault Export, Custody Certificate, Case Outline). No AI enrichment or analysis.
Vault + Analysis	$149/month per attorney	Everything in Vault + access to AI-powered analysis, agent compute, and all AI report types. Includes a monthly AI operations budget of $75/attorney in per-operation credits. Overage billed at rate card prices.

No overage fees for storage, OCR, or basic ingestion. These are included in the platform subscription and remain unlimited. AI enrichment (entity extraction, relationship extraction, summarization, fact extraction) and AI analysis operations are metered per-case at fixed per-operation prices, available only on the Vault + Analysis tier.

Layer 2: AI Operations Rate Card (Per-Case, Metered)

Every AI operation has a fixed price based on value to the attorney, not underlying LLM cost. Prices are decoupled from token costs. Intactus controls model routing internally and captures the spread.

Operation	Price	Typical LLM Cost	Margin	Manual Equivalent
Evidence AI enrichment (per item)	$0.15	~$0.005	~97%	~$20 (paralegal, 6 min)
Research query	$5.00	~$1.50-3.00	40-70%	~$200 (attorney, 40 min)
Case Brief report	$20.00	~$5-10	50-75%	~$1,500 (attorney, 5 hrs)
Deposition cross-reference	$12.00	~$3-6	50-75%	~$800 (attorney, 2.5 hrs)
Entity Dossier	$8.00	~$2-4	50-75%	~$400 (paralegal, 2 hrs)
Chat with My Case (per query)	$1.50	~$0.10-0.30	80-93%	~$100 (attorney, 15 min)
Pattern detection scan	$10.00	~$3-5	50-70%	~$600 (attorney, 2 hrs)
Comparison analysis	$8.00	~$2-5	38-75%	~$500 (attorney, 1.5 hrs)

Rate card prices are listed in the product. Attorneys see exact costs before running an operation. Agent operations (intake triage, research, report drafting) consume the same rate card. Agents are not a separate billing category.

Ingestion cost boundary: Basic ingestion (text extraction, OCR, SHA-256 hashing, manifest recording) is included in the platform subscription for both tiers: unlimited, no per-item charge. AI enrichment (entity extraction, relationship extraction, summarization, and fact extraction via Claude Haiku/Sonnet) is a metered AI operation at $0.15/item, available only on the Vault + Analysis tier. Vault-tier users get fully ingested, hashed, searchable evidence, without AI-generated entities, summaries, or auto-extracted facts.

Layer 3: Margin Expansion (Internal)

Three compounding effects grow margin over time without changing prices:

LLM cost deflation. Model providers drop prices every 6-12 months. Operation prices stay fixed. Today's 50% margin becomes 70% next year.
Caching and amortization. Entity extraction, classification, and summarization happen once at ingestion and are reused across every subsequent query. The more an attorney uses AI on a case, the cheaper each incremental operation becomes, but the price doesn't change.
Model routing optimization. Intactus controls which model runs each operation. Every routing improvement (Haiku instead of Sonnet where quality is equivalent) goes straight to margin. The attorney never sees the difference.

Institutional Tier

Volume licensing for legal aid organizations, funded through DOJ OVW/LAV grants. Custom pricing based on organization size and caseload.

Company Type

Profitable small business (bootstrapped or minimally funded). Not targeting venture scale. Optimizing for sustainable revenue and high margins, not hypergrowth.

Pricing

Three-Layer Pricing Architecture

Layer 1: Platform Subscription (Fixed, Per-Attorney)

Tier	Price	Includes
Vault	$99/month per attorney	Evidence capture, preservation, hashing, manifest, full-text search, timeline, case organization, 8 report types (Case Timeline, Annotated Timeline, Evidence Index, Entity Map, Evidence Ledger, Vault Export, Custody Certificate, Case Outline). No AI enrichment or analysis.
Vault + Analysis	$149/month per attorney	Everything in Vault + access to AI-powered analysis, agent compute, and all AI report types. Includes a monthly AI operations budget of $75/attorney in per-operation credits. Overage billed at rate card prices.

Layer 2: AI Operations Rate Card (Per-Case, Metered)

Operation	Price	Typical LLM Cost	Margin	Manual Equivalent
Evidence AI enrichment (per item)	$0.15	~$0.005	~97%	~$20 (paralegal, 6 min)
Research query	$5.00	~$1.50-3.00	40-70%	~$200 (attorney, 40 min)
Case Brief report	$20.00	~$5-10	50-75%	~$1,500 (attorney, 5 hrs)
Deposition cross-reference	$12.00	~$3-6	50-75%	~$800 (attorney, 2.5 hrs)
Entity Dossier	$8.00	~$2-4	50-75%	~$400 (paralegal, 2 hrs)
Chat with My Case (per query)	$1.50	~$0.10-0.30	80-93%	~$100 (attorney, 15 min)
Pattern detection scan	$10.00	~$3-5	50-70%	~$600 (attorney, 2 hrs)
Comparison analysis	$8.00	~$2-5	38-75%	~$500 (attorney, 1.5 hrs)

Layer 3: Margin Expansion (Internal)

Three compounding effects grow margin over time without changing prices:

LLM cost deflation. Model providers drop prices every 6-12 months. Operation prices stay fixed. Today's 50% margin becomes 70% next year.
Caching and amortization. Entity extraction, classification, and summarization happen once at ingestion and are reused across every subsequent query. The more an attorney uses AI on a case, the cheaper each incremental operation becomes, but the price doesn't change.
Model routing optimization. Intactus controls which model runs each operation. Every routing improvement (Haiku instead of Sonnet where quality is equivalent) goes straight to margin. The attorney never sees the difference.

Institutional Tier

Volume licensing for legal aid organizations, funded through DOJ OVW/LAV grants. Custom pricing based on organization size and caseload.

Unit Economics

Revenue per firm

Platform subscription revenue:

A 5-attorney firm on the Analysis plan: ~$745/month ($8,940/year)
A solo practitioner on the Vault plan: $99/month ($1,188/year)

AI operations revenue (in addition to subscription):

A 5-attorney firm with 10 active cases, moderate AI usage: ~$150-400/month in operations ($75/attorney included, overage beyond that)
A power-user firm running agents on every case: $500-1,500/month in operations. Highly profitable because operations are priced at 2-20x LLM cost.

Blended revenue per firm (subscription + AI ops): ~$180-250/attorney/month for Analysis-tier firms.

Cost per firm (platform layer)

Cost	Amount	Notes
LLM API (ingestion)	~$1-5/month	$0.005 per evidence item, 200-1000 items/month
S3 storage	~$1-5/month	Depends on artifact volume
Compute (ingestion pipeline)	~$5-10/month	Per-firm share of processing infrastructure
Total platform cost per firm	~$7-20/month

Cost per firm (AI operations layer)

AI operations are priced per-operation with margin built into every transaction. LLM costs are the primary variable:

Usage Profile	Monthly AI Revenue	Monthly LLM Cost	AI Operations Margin
Light (5 cases, occasional queries)	~$75 (included budget)	~$15-25	67-80%
Moderate (10 cases, regular queries)	~$200	~$60-100	50-70%
Heavy (15+ cases, agents active)	~$600	~$180-300	50-70%
Power user (agents on every case)	~$1,200	~$350-600	50-71%

Gross margin: 70-90% blended

Platform subscription margin: 85-93%. Storage, ingestion, and search have near-zero marginal cost. This is the floor.

AI operations margin: 50-80%. Per-operation pricing ensures margin on every AI transaction. Margin improves over time through:

LLM cost deflation (model prices drop ~50% annually)
Caching (repeat queries on same evidence hit warm context)
Model routing optimization (cheapest model that produces good output)
Batch processing discounts from providers (volume savings not passed through)

Why heavy users are the best customers: A firm spending $1,200/month on AI operations generates $600-850 in gross margin from AI alone, on top of the $745/month subscription margin. Heavy usage is profitable, not subsidized.

Revenue Targets

Milestone	Paying Attorneys	Monthly Revenue	Annual Revenue
Break-even	~75	~$10K	~$120K
Comfortable	250	~$33K	~$400K
Target	500	~$65K	~$780K
Stretch	1,000	~$130K	~$1.6M

Revenue estimates assume subscription revenue only at a blended average of ~$130/attorney/month (mix of Vault and Vault + Analysis tiers). AI operations revenue is additional upside. At the Target milestone (500 attorneys), AI operations could add $25K-75K/month depending on usage mix.

There are ~650,000 attorneys in solo/small firms in the US. Reaching 500 requires converting 0.08% of the addressable market.

Cost Structure (Fixed)

Item	Monthly Cost	Notes
AWS infrastructure	$500-2,000	Scales with customers
Anthropic API	Variable	Included in per-firm costs above
Vanta/Drata (SOC 2)	$2,500-4,000	Annual compliance monitoring
Domain/DNS/CDN	$50-100
Monitoring/logging	$100-300	DataDog or similar
Total fixed (early stage)	~$3,000-6,000

Distribution & Go-to-Market

Go-to-Market Phase 1: Design Partner (Months 1-3)

Build with a founding design partner firm
Design partner provides real-world feedback, case-tested validation
The firm gets the product free or at-cost during development
Goal: a product that one firm uses daily and would be upset to lose

Go-to-Market Phase 2: Word of Mouth + Content (Months 3-6)

Nathan refers to attorney colleagues who handle similar cases
Content marketing: blog posts on evidence preservation best practices, the Heppner ruling's implications, digital evidence admissibility
SEO targeting: "digital evidence preservation for attorneys," "forensic evidence management," "court-admissible screenshots"
Wisconsin State Bar CLE presentation on digital evidence (partner with Nathan)

Go-to-Market Phase 3: Conference + Community (Months 6-12)

ABA TECHSHOW (Chicago, April), the primary solo/small firm tech conference
NNEDV Technology Safety Summit (victim advocacy / legal aid tech)
State bar technology sections (CLE partnerships)
Legal tech podcasts and publications

Go-to-Market Phase 4: Referral Network (Ongoing)

Attorney-to-attorney referrals (highest-ROI channel for small firms)
Referral incentives (free months, discounts)
Legal aid organization partnerships (grant-funded institutional accounts)

Key Distribution Insight

Only 7% of solo firms have a marketing budget. Discovery happens through:

Peer referrals (other attorneys)
Bar association events and CLEs
Legal publications and blogs
Conference demos

Agent-native as competitive moat: Unlike CaseFleet (no AI architecture), Supio (document analysis only), and Caseway (legal research only), Intactus is built from the ground up for AI agents to operate as first-class practitioners alongside attorneys. The tool layer, agent permission model, and agent audit trail are structural properties of the architecture, not features bolted onto a UI-first platform. Competitors would need to rewrite their API layer to achieve the same agent-native capabilities.

The go-to-market motion is trial-based, not freemium. Attorneys get a 14-day free trial of Vault + Analysis (full functionality) and convert to a paid tier at trial end. There is no feature-limited free tier; the product's value proposition requires forensic integrity and AI enrichment to be compelling. Trial conversion rates for B2B SaaS at $1K-5K ACV with hands-on onboarding: ~25-40%.

Risks & Mitigations

Risk	Mitigation
Solo firms have tiny budgets ($3K/yr on all tech)	Vault tier at $99/mo is ~40% of typical annual tech spend, competitive with CaseFleet's $75/mo AI tier while delivering more value (forensic capture, chain of custody, client portal). AI operations are per-case and pass-through-able to clients.
LLM costs spike with heavy usage	Per-operation pricing with built-in margin means heavy usage is profitable, not subsidized. Per-case caps prevent runaway costs. Tiered model routing, caching, and pre-processing keep underlying costs low.
Attorneys feel "nickel and dimed" by metered pricing	Generous included AI budget ($75/mo) means most attorneys never see overage. Every operation displays its manual-equivalent cost (e.g., "$20 vs. ~$1,500 paralegal time"), framing AI costs as savings. Per-case caps and alerts keep attorneys in control.
Enterprise eDiscovery vendors move downmarket	Their products are architected for millions of documents. The small-firm UX and pricing gap is structural.
Competitors add AI agents	Intactus's agent-native architecture (tool layer, permission model, audit trail) is a structural property, not a feature layer. Retrofitting agent-native design onto a UI-first platform requires rewriting the API layer, which is a multi-year effort. See agent-native.md.
Privilege law evolves unfavorably	Architecture designed around strongest available protections (Anthropic commercial API terms, attorney-directed analysis); Bedrock PrivateLink migration planned for production. Can adapt to new rulings
Grant funding for legal aid is politically volatile	Legal aid is a secondary market; primary revenue comes from paying firms
Market too narrow to sustain growth	Family law + harassment is the starting wedge; the platform naturally serves criminal defense, employment, PI, defamation, and any case with digital evidence. Expansion requires no product changes.

Expansion Path

The Supio/Clio playbook at small-business scale:

Start: Family law + harassment/protective order evidence (Nathan's practice areas)
Expand: Employment law, personal injury, defamation (same platform, new analysis lenses)
Deepen: Practice-area-specific modules (custody evaluation evidence, threat assessment, financial contradiction detection)
Widen: General civil litigation evidence management
Platform: API access for legal tech integrations (Clio, MyCase, etc.)

Each expansion opens the addressable market without requiring architectural changes. The evidence vault and AI analysis layer are practice-area agnostic by design.

Agent-native pricing note: Agent operations consume the same per-operation rate card as human-initiated AI operations, with no separate "agent tier" or "agent add-on." When an Intake Agent classifies evidence, it's billed the same as when an attorney triggers classification manually. This keeps pricing simple and predictable: attorneys manage one AI budget per case regardless of whether humans or agents are doing the work. In future milestones, specialized practice-area agent modules (e.g., "Deposition Prep Agent," "Custody Violation Detector") could become premium add-ons for firms with deep domain needs.

AI Cost Management

Per-case AI billing only works if attorneys have full visibility and control. The platform provides:

Attorney Controls

Control	Description
Per-case monthly cap	Hard spending limit per case (e.g., "$100/month on this case"). Operations fail gracefully when cap is reached.
Per-case alert threshold	Soft warning at a configurable threshold (e.g., "notify me at $50"). No interruption, just visibility.
Firm monthly cap	Overall AI budget ceiling across all cases. Prevents runaway costs firm-wide.
Per-operation approval	Optional: require attorney confirmation before expensive operations (e.g., Case Brief generation). Off by default.
Client-billable flag	Tag operations as billable to client vs. absorbed by firm. Drives the cost export.

Value Comparison Dashboard

Every AI operation displays its estimated manual equivalent: the approximate cost if an attorney or paralegal performed the same work:

Case Brief: Martinez v. Martinez
  Generated in 4 minutes
  AI cost: $20.00
  Equivalent manual effort: ~6 hours ($1,500*)
  * Based on average paralegal rate of $250/hr

Monthly firm-level summary shows aggregate savings:

January 2026: AI Operations Summary
  Total AI operations:              $142.50
  Included in plan:                 -$75.00
  Overage billed:                    $67.50
  Estimated manual equivalent:    $8,400.00
  Your savings this month:        $8,257.50

This framing turns per-operation billing from a cost center into a savings calculator. The attorney sees ROI, not line items.

Client-Facing Cost Export

The attorney dashboard generates a per-case cost export using professional, client-facing terminology. The export uses legal service language with no mention of "AI," "LLM," or "tokens":

Internal Operation	Client-Facing Label
Evidence ingestion (47 items)	Digital evidence processing (47 items)
Research query	Case evidence analysis
Case Brief generation	Comprehensive case summary preparation
Deposition cross-reference	Deposition testimony verification
Chat with My Case (12 queries)	Client case information service
Entity Dossier	Key party background compilation
Pattern detection scan	Evidence pattern analysis
Comparison analysis	Document comparison review

Export formats: PDF (for client invoices) and CSV (for import into billing systems like Clio, MyCase, or QuickBooks). The attorney decides whether to pass through at cost, mark up, or absorb. Intactus provides the data; the firm controls the billing.

This positions AI costs alongside existing case expenses (filing fees, process server, expert witnesses) as a standard line item on client invoices.

Key Distribution Insight

Only 7% of solo firms have a marketing budget. Discovery happens through:

Peer referrals (other attorneys)
Bar association events and CLEs
Legal publications and blogs
Conference demos

Risks & Mitigations

Risk	Mitigation
Solo firms have tiny budgets ($3K/yr on all tech)	Vault tier at $99/mo is ~40% of typical annual tech spend, competitive with CaseFleet's $75/mo AI tier while delivering more value (forensic capture, chain of custody, client portal). AI operations are per-case and pass-through-able to clients.
LLM costs spike with heavy usage	Per-operation pricing with built-in margin means heavy usage is profitable, not subsidized. Per-case caps prevent runaway costs. Tiered model routing, caching, and pre-processing keep underlying costs low.
Attorneys feel "nickel and dimed" by metered pricing	Generous included AI budget ($75/mo) means most attorneys never see overage. Every operation displays its manual-equivalent cost (e.g., "$20 vs. ~$1,500 paralegal time"), framing AI costs as savings. Per-case caps and alerts keep attorneys in control.
Enterprise eDiscovery vendors move downmarket	Their products are architected for millions of documents. The small-firm UX and pricing gap is structural.
Competitors add AI agents	Intactus's agent-native architecture (tool layer, permission model, audit trail) is a structural property, not a feature layer. Retrofitting agent-native design onto a UI-first platform requires rewriting the API layer, which is a multi-year effort. See agent-native.md.
Privilege law evolves unfavorably	Architecture designed around strongest available protections (Anthropic commercial API terms, attorney-directed analysis); Bedrock PrivateLink migration planned for production. Can adapt to new rulings
Grant funding for legal aid is politically volatile	Legal aid is a secondary market; primary revenue comes from paying firms
Market too narrow to sustain growth	Family law + harassment is the starting wedge; the platform naturally serves criminal defense, employment, PI, defamation, and any case with digital evidence. Expansion requires no product changes.

Expansion Path

The Supio/Clio playbook at small-business scale:

Start: Family law + harassment/protective order evidence (Nathan's practice areas)
Expand: Employment law, personal injury, defamation (same platform, new analysis lenses)
Deepen: Practice-area-specific modules (custody evaluation evidence, threat assessment, financial contradiction detection)
Widen: General civil litigation evidence management
Platform: API access for legal tech integrations (Clio, MyCase, etc.)

Each expansion opens the addressable market without requiring architectural changes. The evidence vault and AI analysis layer are practice-area agnostic by design.

AI Cost Management

Per-case AI billing only works if attorneys have full visibility and control. The platform provides:

Attorney Controls

Control	Description
Per-case monthly cap	Hard spending limit per case (e.g., "$100/month on this case"). Operations fail gracefully when cap is reached.
Per-case alert threshold	Soft warning at a configurable threshold (e.g., "notify me at $50"). No interruption, just visibility.
Firm monthly cap	Overall AI budget ceiling across all cases. Prevents runaway costs firm-wide.
Per-operation approval	Optional: require attorney confirmation before expensive operations (e.g., Case Brief generation). Off by default.
Client-billable flag	Tag operations as billable to client vs. absorbed by firm. Drives the cost export.

Value Comparison Dashboard

Every AI operation displays its estimated manual equivalent: the approximate cost if an attorney or paralegal performed the same work:

Case Brief: Martinez v. Martinez
  Generated in 4 minutes
  AI cost: $20.00
  Equivalent manual effort: ~6 hours ($1,500*)
  * Based on average paralegal rate of $250/hr

Monthly firm-level summary shows aggregate savings:

January 2026: AI Operations Summary
  Total AI operations:              $142.50
  Included in plan:                 -$75.00
  Overage billed:                    $67.50
  Estimated manual equivalent:    $8,400.00
  Your savings this month:        $8,257.50

This framing turns per-operation billing from a cost center into a savings calculator. The attorney sees ROI, not line items.

Client-Facing Cost Export

The attorney dashboard generates a per-case cost export using professional, client-facing terminology. The export uses legal service language with no mention of "AI," "LLM," or "tokens":

Internal Operation	Client-Facing Label
Evidence ingestion (47 items)	Digital evidence processing (47 items)
Research query	Case evidence analysis
Case Brief generation	Comprehensive case summary preparation
Deposition cross-reference	Deposition testimony verification
Chat with My Case (12 queries)	Client case information service
Entity Dossier	Key party background compilation
Pattern detection scan	Evidence pattern analysis
Comparison analysis	Document comparison review

This positions AI costs alongside existing case expenses (filing fees, process server, expert witnesses) as a standard line item on client invoices.

Expansion Path

The Supio/Clio playbook at small-business scale:

Start: Family law + harassment/protective order evidence (Nathan's practice areas)
Expand: Employment law, personal injury, defamation (same platform, new analysis lenses)
Deepen: Practice-area-specific modules (custody evaluation evidence, threat assessment, financial contradiction detection)
Widen: General civil litigation evidence management
Platform: API access for legal tech integrations (Clio, MyCase, etc.)

Each expansion opens the addressable market without requiring architectural changes. The evidence vault and AI analysis layer are practice-area agnostic by design.

AI Cost Management

Per-case AI billing only works if attorneys have full visibility and control. The platform provides:

Attorney Controls

Control	Description
Per-case monthly cap	Hard spending limit per case (e.g., "$100/month on this case"). Operations fail gracefully when cap is reached.
Per-case alert threshold	Soft warning at a configurable threshold (e.g., "notify me at $50"). No interruption, just visibility.
Firm monthly cap	Overall AI budget ceiling across all cases. Prevents runaway costs firm-wide.
Per-operation approval	Optional: require attorney confirmation before expensive operations (e.g., Case Brief generation). Off by default.
Client-billable flag	Tag operations as billable to client vs. absorbed by firm. Drives the cost export.

Value Comparison Dashboard

Every AI operation displays its estimated manual equivalent: the approximate cost if an attorney or paralegal performed the same work:

Case Brief: Martinez v. Martinez
  Generated in 4 minutes
  AI cost: $20.00
  Equivalent manual effort: ~6 hours ($1,500*)
  * Based on average paralegal rate of $250/hr

Monthly firm-level summary shows aggregate savings:

January 2026: AI Operations Summary
  Total AI operations:              $142.50
  Included in plan:                 -$75.00
  Overage billed:                    $67.50
  Estimated manual equivalent:    $8,400.00
  Your savings this month:        $8,257.50

This framing turns per-operation billing from a cost center into a savings calculator. The attorney sees ROI, not line items.

Client-Facing Cost Export

The attorney dashboard generates a per-case cost export using professional, client-facing terminology. The export uses legal service language with no mention of "AI," "LLM," or "tokens":

Internal Operation	Client-Facing Label
Evidence ingestion (47 items)	Digital evidence processing (47 items)
Research query	Case evidence analysis
Case Brief generation	Comprehensive case summary preparation
Deposition cross-reference	Deposition testimony verification
Chat with My Case (12 queries)	Client case information service
Entity Dossier	Key party background compilation
Pattern detection scan	Evidence pattern analysis
Comparison analysis	Document comparison review

This positions AI costs alongside existing case expenses (filing fees, process server, expert witnesses) as a standard line item on client invoices.