Free to estimate. Paid to enforce.

A free advisory comment is useful because it spreads the mental model: reviewers learn to ask about P90, model fit, retries, context, fallback, and escalation. That education creates trust and gives teams a low-friction way to evaluate Class1 on public or local code.

The paid value starts when the report changes the merge outcome. Private repositories, blocking policy gates, estimate persistence, actuals ingestion, private rate basis, and monthly variance reporting are organisational controls. Those are the parts a team pays for because they change behaviour.

The pilot should be sold around one budget owner and one repository first. The first week proves installation and PR comment value. The first month proves whether actuals can be paired. The second month is where the flywheel starts: repeated workflows move from rough class estimates toward locally calibrated control.