Let’s talk about forty-seven cents.
That is what a United States federal agency paid for a year of Google’s flagship AI model under the government’s OneGov arrangements last year. Forty-seven cents. ChatGPT Enterprise went for a dollar a year per agency, and Anthropic matched that dollar for Claude within days. Bloomberg described the price as the largest concession the government had ever extracted from a technology vendor, and GSA ran with that framing — millions of federal employees given access, roughly 1.4 billion dollars in claimed AI savings, 1.68 billion in total OneGov savings.
Then, in August 2025, a former Air Force chief software officer named Nicolas Chaillan filed two protests at the Government Accountability Office. He claimed the deals skipped the security authorisation federal systems are supposed to carry, ignored the rules that require the government to pay commercial market prices, dodged competition requirements, and would end in vendor lock-in. One line in his filing is the one nobody has dealt with since. These are one-year deals, he said, with no clear understanding of year two, three, four or five.
Nobody answered that. They just shipped the next version of the deal.
On the tenth of September this year, GSA announced the successor: a twenty-seven month agreement with OpenAI, effective the first of October. And the structure is the whole story. No platform-access fee. No minimum orders. No spend commitment. In exchange, agencies pay per token, at a fifty percent discount on list, and eligibility now stretches past the executive branch into the legislative and judicial branches, plus state, local and tribal governments.
The entrance fee went to zero, and the meter became the contract.
Now picture the person standing under that meter. A programme manager in a state agency, a fixed annual budget, a purchase card, and a dashboard where consumption just climbs. Every prompt, every summarised document, every drafted letter lands in that number. There is no ceiling in the agreement, because a ceiling is the one thing a consumption deal never volunteers — and when the budget runs out in month eight, the work stops, or somebody raids another line to keep the tool that everyone now depends on.
That is what “no minimums, no commitment” actually does. It removes your obligation on the way in and their liability on the way out. Flexibility on the entry, exposure on the exit.
And look at how the taxpayer learns this was a good deal. The savings figure — the 1.4 billion, the 1.68 billion — is calculated against a list price that the vendor sets. The seller writes the discount, the seller writes the reference price, and the seller’s own product telemetry counts the tokens that generate the bill. That is not measurement. That is a number about the buyer, supplied by the party getting paid, and it becomes the evidence in a press release that everyone downstream repeats.
The next layer is worse, and it is quieter. Because the government is the biggest buyer in the world, and its stack becomes the default that municipalities, contractors and suppliers copy if they want to sell into it. Procurement is not just purchasing. It is standard-setting, with a purchase order attached. So the same companies now discussing the standards that will govern how the state uses these models — an industry-led body, in OpenAI’s own words, built “with or without government support” — are the companies holding the meter, the workflow and the institutional memory.
That last word is the one that matters. Three and a half million people doing the state’s thinking inside one company’s interface. The switching cost is no longer an export file. It is a re-procurement, a retraining cycle, a rebuild of every template and habit, and the political appetite to do it at all. Which is how an administration ends up directing agencies to stop using one vendor, getting sued, losing a preliminary injunction, and quietly reversing its own platform directive in the space of a few months. When the state is a tenant, the state’s capability flickers with the landlord’s politics.
So here is the operator read, because your company is running the same play in miniature.
The free pilot is not generosity. It is customer acquisition, and it is paid back through the meter — that is the only way the economics work. So when someone offers you the tool for nothing, you are negotiating the exit, not the entry.
Ask for the ceiling in writing. A hard cap, an alert at eighty percent, and a named person accountable for the variance.
Ask what adoption looks like in year three when usage has doubled, and get the number in the contract, not in a slide.
Ask what you can take with you — not “can we export,” but can your workflow, your definitions, your prompts and your records run somewhere else next month without a project.
And ask who owns the definition of the unit you are billed in.
The principle is not that the state got cheated, or that a free seat is a trick. Sometimes the free seat is genuinely good value. The principle is that price at the door is a decision about who owns the room behind it. Forty-seven cents was never a discount.
It was a position.
Price the exit before you take the gift.
You’ve got this.