Exception Path Inventory

Exception Path Inventory is the practice of pricing a workflow by the branches it must handle, not the volume it processes. A trigger that fires 4,000 times a month on the happy path is cheap; the same trigger with eleven exception branches (refunds, partial payments, duplicate CRM records, missing tax IDs) is where delivery hours actually go. Agencies that scope from volume alone win the build and lose the retainer, because every unmodeled branch becomes unpaid maintenance. Before quoting, list each branch, who owns it after launch, and what a silent failure costs the client. The category description puts exception paths and ownership after launch alongside volume and error cost for exactly this reason. A concrete case: a lead-routing flow built in Make can run cleanly for weeks, then a single malformed form submission stalls the queue until someone notices. Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.10 per million input tokens makes classification of those edge cases affordable, but only if the branches were enumerated during scoping.