second moment

Predictable margins for AI agents

Companies selling AI outcomes collect fixed revenue per unit and pay wildly variable model costs. Second Moment is the counterparty that makes the cost side a number: a fixed price per unit of agent work, underwritten.

The problem, in one row of numbers

Per-outcome pricing is winning ($0.99/resolution at Intercom Fin, $1.50–2.00 at Zendesk) while the cost of a single unit routinely runs 2–16× its mean at p99 — and in 2026, frontier providers repriced upward for the first time. 73% of organizations report AI costs exceeding projections (FinOps Foundation, n≈1,200). Every vendor with a published per-outcome price is short that volatility with no hedge. Second Moment takes the other side.

What Second Moment offers

The free quoteExport your usage traces; get back a one-page analysis: your realized cost distribution, the fixed price we'd write, and that contract backtested against your own history — including the weeks we'd lose. No integration.
Fixed price / unitAfter a burn-in on 100–200 of your real inputs: a flat rate per resolved ticket / merged fix / completed task. Tiered (Small/Medium/Large, assigned by model at intake) where task scope varies widely. Contracts reprice transparently on provider list-price changes.
The capKeep paying actual cost; Second Moment absorbs everything above a strike — margin insurance for the tail, priced off your fitted distribution.
Routing upsideIdentical tasks vary up to ~700× in cost by model choice. Second Moment's difficulty-conditioned routing lowers the cost it insures — measured against a shadow baseline, shared with you.

Why it's priceable (validated, $0 spent)

Predictability
ICC 0.68
task identity explains 2× more cost variance than rerun noise — 57k runs
Data basis
63k traces
per-task costs across tickets, code, research benchmarks
Tail shape
2–16×
p99/mean by workload family; fatter on cheaper models
Working PoC
Live
trace export in → priced quote + backtest out
Open the interactive pricing demo → — price three real public agent workloads live (adjust volume, margin, and coverage; see tiers, cap fees, and the stress backtests with the weeks Second Moment eats), see the three-stage integration path — or drop in your own trace export: pricing runs entirely in your browser, and your file never leaves the page.

Who should talk to us

First step costs nothing: export traces, get the quote exhibit on your own data, keep it either way.

Contact · rahul@secondmoment.co · secondmoment.co Validation report & methodology available on request