AI Infrastructure That Answers to You, Not a Cloud Provider
Fixed costs. Complete data sovereignty. Zero vendor lock-in. On-premises AI gives business leaders control over budget, compliance, and competitive advantage.
Cloud AI Costs Double When You Least Expect It
Flagship prices keep climbing: GPT-5.5 cost 2x more than GPT-5.4, and GPT-6 Astra now lists at $10/$50 per million tokens, up from GPT-5.5's $5/$30. Cheaper tiers move too — sometimes down, sometimes up when a promotional rate expires — so no budget is safe. Top subscriptions like ChatGPT Pro and Claude Max 20x now cost $200/month per seat. A 50-person org spending $156K/year on cloud AI today could face $300K next year — with no cap in sight.
Data Sovereignty and Regulatory Risk
CLOUD Act Exposure
US cloud providers can be compelled to hand over your data regardless of origin. No data processing agreement overrides this legal reality.
Quebec Law 25 Compliance
Sending data to US-based AI services without explicit consent risks penalties up to $25M or 4% of global revenue.
PIPEDA Requirements
Cross-border AI processing may not meet PIPEDA's adequacy requirements. On-premises processing keeps data under Canadian jurisdiction.
Board-Level Liability
Directors have a fiduciary duty to protect corporate data. Cloud AI exposure can trigger director liability and shareholder claims.
Cloud Dependency Creates Strategic Risk
Vendor Lock-In
Every integration builds switching costs. The longer you stay, the harder it is to leave.
Feature Gating
Best capabilities locked behind $200/month tiers. Your access controlled by someone else's pricing.
Unilateral Price Changes
Cloud providers change pricing with 30 days' notice. No recourse when costs double.
Data Training on Your Inputs
Your proprietary analyses may improve models available to competitors. Opt-out is neither transparent nor guaranteed.
Top 10 Ways Faraday Helps Business Leaders
- Fixed AI Budgets — One fixed monthly plan replaces variable cloud invoices
- Data Residency Compliance — All AI processing stays within Canadian borders
- Competitive Intelligence Protection — Strategic analysis without third-party cloud exposure
- Unlimited Inference for Decision Support — Financial models and scenario projections running 24/7
- No Seat-Based Pricing — 50-person team pays the same as a 5-person startup
- Due Diligence AI — Analyze acquisition targets without leaking deliberations
- Board Reporting Automation — Generate KPI dashboards with financial data on-premises
- Regulatory Change Monitoring — Track compliance updates without exposing gaps
- Succession-Proof Infrastructure — Hardware in your office, with maintenance and replacement included for the full term
- Canadian Data Gravity — Institutional knowledge stays in models fine-tuned on your data
On-Premises vs. Cloud AI
| Consideration | Cloud AI for Business | Faraday On-Premises |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Variable cost that doubles annually | $299 / $599 / $999 a month — hardware, models and support included |
| Pricing model | Per-seat pricing that scales with headcount | Unlimited inference with zero per-token cost |
| Data location | Data leaves your network to US servers | Data never leaves your office |
| Vendor lock-in | Vendor lock-in deepens with every integration | Run any open model with no lock-in |
| Price changes | 30-day notice for price changes | Fixed cost for the full service period |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is on-premises AI cheaper than paying for cloud AI subscriptions?
It can be, because the plan price is fixed for the whole term while per-seat subscriptions grow with headcount. Faraday Machines' pricing page compares a 10-person team paying $200 per seat per month for cloud AI, $72,000 over three years, with the Growth tier at $599 a month, or $21,564 over the 36-month term, including hardware and support. That is a saving of about $50,000, or roughly 70%, and the cost does not rise with usage.
How does on-premises AI reduce CLOUD Act exposure for a Canadian company?
Data handled by a US cloud provider can be subject to the US CLOUD Act regardless of where it is stored. With Faraday Machines, a Toronto company, the AI runs on Mac Studio hardware in your own office, so prompts and documents are never handed to a US cloud AI provider in the first place. That keeps processing in Canada, which also simplifies PIPEDA and Quebec Law 25 questions about cross-border transfers.
What size on-premises AI system does a 25-person company need?
A 25-person company fits Faraday Machines' Scale tier: one Mac Studio M5 Ultra with 512 GB of unified memory for $999 a month on a 36-month plan ($35,964 over the term), including the hardware, updates, maintenance and priority support. Each Mac Studio delivers about 50 tokens per second on a frontier model, and Scale holds the largest shipped models: MiniMax M3 at 4-bit, a tighter fit, and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash as a compressed 1–3-bit build. Organizations above 29 people can get larger setups by quote.
Are we locked into one AI vendor if we move to on-premises AI hardware?
No. Faraday Machines systems run open-weight models such as GLM-5.3-Flash, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Qwen3.8-27B, and you can run any open model that fits the hardware. When a better open model is released it can be swapped in without renegotiating a contract or rebuilding integrations around one vendor's API, and Faraday updates the preloaded models as capabilities improve.
What if on-premises AI doesn't fit our workflows after we sign up?
Faraday Machines limits that risk in two ways. You can test a demo system with your own data and workflows at the Toronto office or on-site before signing up, and every plan carries a 30-day money-back guarantee; after that, the plan runs its full 36-month term. Updates, maintenance and replacement coverage are included for the whole term, with a failed unit typically replaced within 48 hours.
Take Control of Your AI Strategy
Fixed costs. Complete data sovereignty. Zero vendor dependency. Calculate your total savings.
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