Economic

How PULSE makes money or has measurable impact

Scope note — October 19, 2026. This page records our current working position, not a settled business case. The MVP scope is events (l'événementiel), positioned as an add-on to Omerlo 6, and our first named prospective client is Le Soleil. Two things are still unconfirmed: what problem Le Soleil wants PULSE to solve, and where their data will live (as of the technical sync of October 14, their data is not in Omerlo). Everything below marked hypothesis is ours to validate with Simon, not something the client has confirmed. This page will change as those answers arrive.

Where the revenue comes from

PULSE is not sold as a standalone product today. It is an add-on module to Omerlo 6, which means it inherits an existing customer base and an existing billing relationship — no new sales motion is required to reach the first users.

#	Revenue line	How it works	Status
1	Per-tenant subscription	Monthly fee per Omerlo tenant that enables PULSE. Each Omerlo customer is a tenant (Security), so the unit of sale matches the unit of isolation.	Primary model
2	Tiering by scale	Price steps by number of connected sources, monitored entities, or sync frequency. Larger ecosystems cost more to ingest and are worth more to monitor.	Likely, post-MVP
3	Seats	Per-user pricing within a tenant for the analyst and editorial users who work in the dashboard daily.	Hypothesis
4	Reports tier	Scheduled weekly and monthly ecosystem summaries, planned for Iteration 9, sold as a higher tier rather than included.	Planned feature, pricing open
5	API access	The read-only PULSE API planned for Iteration 10, for clients integrating entity, score and trend data into their own tools.	Planned feature, pricing open
6	Beyond Omerlo	Simon has indicated PULSE may later generalize past Omerlo tenants — economic development agencies, chambers of commerce, municipalities, incubators. Same engine, different buyer.	Direction, not scoped

Lines 1 and 2 are the ones the MVP has to make credible. Lines 4 and 5 are already on the roadmap as features, so they cost us nothing extra to position commercially.

Le Soleil: how it could generate value

Le Soleil is a regional news organization. A newsroom does not buy an "ecosystem intelligence platform" — it buys stories it would otherwise miss, coverage it can defend, and advertising it can sell. The five angles below are ordered by how directly they produce money, and each one names the metric that would prove it.

#	Angle	Mechanism	Measure of success	Status
1	Advertising and sponsorship prospecting	PULSE ranks organizations in the coverage area by activity and detects rising activity. An organization growing or launching events is an advertising prospect, surfaced before a competitor reaches them.	Prospects surfaced that convert to pipeline; ad revenue attributable to PULSE-sourced leads.	Hypothesis — most direct revenue line
2	Editorial lead generation	Change detection on organizations and events in the coverage area — a new organization, a leadership change, an unusual spike in activity — surfaced to the newsroom as story leads, each linked to its source evidence.	Stories published from PULSE leads; time from signal to published story.	Hypothesis — closest to the MVP we are building
3	Regional events radar	The MVP scope is events. A newsroom covering a region needs to know what is happening across it, without an editor manually checking municipal sites, press releases and social feeds.	Share of notable regional events identified before the event date; monitoring hours saved per week.	Hypothesis — aligns with current scope
4	Coverage gap detection	Comparing ecosystem activity against what the newsroom actually covered shows where a community or sector is active but under-covered.	Identified gaps acted on; engagement on stories filling them.	Hypothesis, needs subscriber data
5	Subscriber growth	If their subscriber database can be joined to ecosystem activity, coverage can be aimed at communities where interest is high and coverage is thin.	Subscriptions attributable to PULSE-informed coverage.	Dependent on access to the subscriber database

Angles 2 and 3 are the ones the current MVP delivers against, so they are what we should be able to demonstrate at Iteration 4 (November 17). Angle 1 needs no new engineering beyond the activity score we are already building, which makes it the cheapest commercial story to tell. Angles 4 and 5 both depend on data we do not have access to and should not be promised.

Measurable impact

Two kinds of measurement matter, and we are accountable for both.

Product impact — does PULSE change what the client does? Measured by the metrics in the Le Soleil table above, each of which needs a baseline captured before PULSE is in use. Without a baseline, "hours saved" is an assertion.

Engineering impact — does PULSE produce data a client can act on? These are our own deliverables and we can measure them without waiting for the client.

Metric	Why it matters commercially	Where it is reported
Entity resolution precision, recall and F1 on the labelled evaluation set	A platform that merges the wrong organizations produces decisions the client cannot trust. This is our core quality claim.	Iteration and Release Notes
Duplicate records collapsed; entities resolved	The visible before-and-after of the unified data model.	Iteration and Release Notes
Number of sources integrated end to end	Each additional source compounds the value of every other one.	Product Roadmap
Freshness — lag from a change at the source to the dashboard	A story lead is worth less the day after a competitor publishes.	Performance
Evidence traceability — share of displayed figures linking to a source record	Target is 100%. A newsroom cannot publish from a number it cannot trace.	Testing Plan and Continuous Integration
Cross-tenant isolation test passing	Showing one client's data to another ends the commercial relationship outright. Enforced in the database, proven in CI.	Security
Operating cost per tenant per month	Determines whether per-tenant pricing has a margin at all. Fly.io was chosen partly on this (D1).	Budget

Open questions

These gate the business case, and the first two can only be answered by Simon.

1. What problem does Le Soleil want PULSE to solve, which workflow should it support, and who uses it day to day?
2. Where will Le Soleil's data live — will they move onto Omerlo, or do we integrate their systems directly?
3. Who owns hosting cost, given a deployed environment is due at Iteration 4 on November 17?
4. Is PULSE priced as an Omerlo module by deRabane, or billed separately?
5. One PULSE deployment per client, or one shared deployment — this changes operating cost per tenant and therefore the margin on revenue line 1.

See also: Budget, Personas, Product Roadmap, Risks.