10  Guide 7 — Go-to-Market, Pricing & Selling Playbook

10.1 How to actually make money from research agents

10.2 The three customers (and who pays)

Customer Who uses Who pays Sales motion
Individual researcher / PhD student Themselves Themselves (card, JazzCash/EasyPaisa, PayPal) Self-serve, freemium, content marketing
Lab / department 5–50 researchers PI’s grant or department budget Inside sales, workshops, pilots
Institution / enterprise Hundreds–thousands University (ORIC, library, graduate school) or R&D budget Field sales, RFP/tender, 3–9-month cycle

Rule from the council: market to individuals, sell to institutions.

10.3 Pricing (starting point; adjust with data)

Plan Monthly Annual Limits
Free $0 — 3 discovery runs, 1 review (≤30 papers), watermark
Student $9 (regional) / $19 $90 / $190 Unlimited discovery, 3 reviews/month, exports
Pro $29 $290 All five agents, unlimited, priority models
Lab (10 seats) — $2,500–5,000 Shared library, admin, invoice billing
Institution — $20k–100k Unlimited seats, SSO, training, reports
Enterprise — $100k–500k On-prem/VPC, custom pipelines, SLA

Regional pricing: Pakistan/South Asia/Africa ≈ 30–40% of US price; GCC ≈ 80–100%.

Cost side (rough): a typical literature review of 80 papers costs a few dollars in LLM tokens with Claude Opus 5 (adaptive thinking, structured outputs, prompt caching) — margins are healthy at $29/month if you cap heavy usage or route bulk screening to a cheaper model.

10.4 Channels

  1. Content (Codanics engine) — YouTube tutorials & demos, WhatsApp channel, the free course playlist, the paid course. Every video ends with “try the agent free”.
  2. Community — PhD-student groups, ResearchGate, LinkedIn, X/Twitter academic communities, Discord.
  3. Universities — ORIC directors, libraries, graduate schools, deans of research. Offer seminars + pilots.
  4. Conferences & journals clubs — live demos; sponsor student sessions.
  5. Partners — reference-manager tools, publishers, core facilities, EdTech resellers in GCC.

10.5 The pilot playbook (institutions)

Step Action Artefact
1 Find a champion (a supervisor or ORIC officer) Discovery call notes
2 3-month free pilot for one department (≤50 users) Pilot agreement (1 page)
3 Onboarding workshop (2 hours) Slides + recording
4 Weekly usage & outcome report Dashboard/email
5 End-of-pilot report: time saved, reviews completed, proposals generated PDF report
6 Proposal to dean/ORIC with 3 tiers Quote + contract

Success metrics that convince deans: time-to-literature-review ↓ 60%, proposals submitted ↑, papers submitted ↑, supervision logs available for accreditation.

10.6 Sales collateral you need

  • One-page product sheet per agent (use the guides in this folder).
  • A 10-minute demo video per agent.
  • ROI calculator (hours saved × researcher hourly cost).
  • Security & privacy sheet (data flow, storage, LLM provider, retention).
  • Academic-integrity statement (how outputs are traceable; AI-use disclosure).
  • Case study from the first pilot.

10.7 Objections & answers

Objection Answer
“AI hallucinates citations.” Every citation comes from a retrieved record with DOI/ID; the model cannot cite outside the retrieved set; we show provenance.
“Journals ban AI writing.” Most allow AI assistance with disclosure; we generate the disclosure and keep an edit log; the human remains the author.
“Our data is sensitive.” On-prem/VPC option; only summaries go to the LLM for the Experiment Agent; regional hosting.
“Students will cheat.” The agent is a coach with an audit trail; supervisors see logs; it improves — not replaces — student work.
“We already have Scopus/Turnitin.” Complementary: we sit on top of databases and automate the workflow; integrations available.

10.8 12-month revenue model (illustrative)

Quarter Individuals (paying) Labs Institutions ARR
Q1 100 × $19 2 0 ~$30k
Q2 400 6 1 pilot → 1 paid ($30k) ~$150k
Q3 900 12 2 ($40k avg) ~$330k
Q4 1,500 20 4 ($50k avg) ~$600k