Failure PatternDecision layer

The Raffi Per-Action Margin Trap: Why Agencies Fail With Raffi on High-Volume Roles

Symptom: Client invoices stay flat at the retainer price while Raffi's usage line climbs past $1.50 per candidate reveal and $0.45 per AI minute on a single 200-applicant role. Root cause: Raffi prices on actions, not seats: candidate reveals at $1.50, sourced job promotions at $99, and AI interview time at $0.45 per minute, so a fixed monthly retainer decouples from actual delivery cost.

By InnovaAI ResearchPublished

Screening Interview Assist
How do you recognize it?
  • •Client invoices stay flat at the retainer price while Raffi's usage line climbs past $1.50 per candidate reveal and $0.45 per AI minute on a single 200-applicant role
  • •Recruiters stop promoting BYO jobs to sourced status because each promotion silently adds $99, so the 24-hour interview promise quietly slips to a week
  • •The agency eats the gap between the $199 Pro or $599 Growth plan and the real per-action spend, and nobody reconciles the two until quarter end
  • •Clients on the Free tier keep unlimited BYO jobs running, so the agency absorbs screening cost with no sourced-job revenue attached
  • •Shortlists arrive ranked but the client disputes the rubric, forcing unpaid re-screening cycles that burn additional AI minutes
Why does it happen?
  • •Raffi prices on actions, not seats: candidate reveals at $1.50, sourced job promotions at $99, and AI interview time at $0.45 per minute, so a fixed monthly retainer decouples from actual delivery cost
  • •The Free plan's unlimited BYO jobs and unlimited seats make it easy for agencies to onboard client volume before mapping which roles will be promoted to sourced and billed
  • •Plan inclusions are thin relative to volume: Pro bundles 1 sourced job per month and Growth bundles 5, so any agency running more than a handful of active roles per client is topping up credits
  • •Role-specific rubrics are configured per job, and agencies that reuse a generic scorecard across clients trigger candidate disputes that require re-interviewing at full AI-minute cost
How do you fix it?
  • •Pull the per-action usage report in the Raffi admin panel and tag every client workspace with its actual reveal, sourced-job, and AI-minute spend before renewing any retainer
  • •Move high-volume clients off the Free tier onto Growth at $599/mo so the 5 included sourced jobs absorb the roles most likely to be promoted
  • •Set an internal rule that a BYO job is only promoted to sourced after the client signs off on the $99 per-job charge in writing
  • •Rebuild each client's scorecard from their own job brief inside Raffi rather than cloning a template, and lock the rubric before the first invite goes out
  • •Cap AI interview minutes per role in the workspace settings so a single runaway requisition cannot consume the month's margin
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