The book
The Wrapper Question
How to Buy AI Software, Value an AI Company, and Know What It Actually Owns
Almost every AI product is a thin layer over a model somebody else trained. So the useful question is not what it does. It is what the company actually owns when the demo ends, and what that is worth.
Three numbers from the index
- 607 of 652
- companies in the index sell exactly one product
- 25 models
- from ten developers sit under hundreds of tools
- $1.68 vs $600
- the same monthly workload, cheapest model against dearest
One question, from three chairs
417 pages, 19 chapters and 8 appendices, including a question bank, all eighteen categories compared, seventeen models priced, and worked examples with the arithmetic left in.
Part One
The anatomy of an AI product
What an AI product is made of, and which parts of it a company can honestly be said to own.
Part Two
For buyers
Finding what you already pay for twice, what you are genuinely locked into, and the questions worth asking before you sign.
Part Three
For founders
What makes a company acquirable rather than absorbable, and what the people writing the cheque actually underwrite.
Part Four
For acquirers and investors
Underwriting a company whose central capability is a supplier relationship, and the diligence that standard templates miss.
Where the numbers come from
Every catalogue figure in the book comes from the index this site runs, and the book says so on the page it appears. It is a curated catalogue of 715 tools, not a census of the AI market, and it never claims to be one.
Model prices were taken from each provider’s own published page and dated. Where a figure could not be verified at first hand, the book says which one and why. There are no benchmark scores, because we do not run benchmarks.
Read the methodology →If the model underneath became free and perfect tomorrow, what would still be worth paying for?
The question the book is built on
Get the book
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This is our own book, so we earn from it either way. Saying so before you click rather than after is the whole point of the thing.
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