# What to bring to an AI vendor renewal

AI contracts renew fast and grow faster. Most companies walk into a renewal knowing their total bill and little else. The vendor knows far more. These are the numbers that change the conversation.

## 1. Your effective rate, not the list price

List prices are public, so they're no leverage. What matters is your **effective rate**: what you were billed divided by what the same usage costs at list. A 20% discount should show up as 0.80×. If your bills run at 0.83× against an agreed 0.80×, the discount isn't fully on the bill, and that's money to claim back before you negotiate the next one.

Work it out per model: cache reads, batch and priority tiers and long-context rates all move it. [Rates](/docs/rates) does this from each provider's own usage.

## 2. Where your commitment is heading

If you committed to spend an amount, the question is where this pace ends:

- **Short of it**, and you'll pay for usage you won't use. That's an argument for a smaller commitment, or a longer term to use it in.
- **Past it**, and overage rates apply. That's an argument for a bigger tier now.
- **Just short of a tier**, and the next discount band is a few weeks' usage away.

Carry the last month's daily average to the period's end; [Agreements](/docs/agreements) does it per term, year or month.

## 3. Seats nobody uses

Per-seat tools (Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT Enterprise, Claude Enterprise) are priced per seat, but what matters is the cost per person who used one. 120 Copilot seats at $39 with 77 people using them is $60.78 per user, not $39. Release the idle seats before the renewal fixes the count for another year.

## 4. What else you could run it on

A switch you could make is a better argument than a discount you'd like. Price your real workload on another model or host before the call; the [cost simulator](/simulate) does it from your own token mix.

## 5. The date that matters

Not the end date: the **notice date**. Miss it and an auto-renewing agreement renews on the old terms. Put it on a calendar with reminders 90, 60 and 30 days ahead, so the preparation starts while you still have leverage.

## After the renewal

Freeze how you paid before the new terms start, so you can prove later what the deal saved apart from usage growth. See [How to prove an AI contract saved money](/guides/prove-ai-vendor-savings).