Last updated: 2026-07-01
Touchmark is a quality-adjusted AI billing platform: it scores every output a connected product generates and adjusts what the end customer pays based on that score. Its published AI quality indices are cited by Fortune 500 procurement teams, and poor outputs are discounted or refunded automatically.
About Touchmark
Touchmark is a quality-based AI pricing platform built by Y Combinator S26 founders Ilia Bolgov and Roman Yanushevskyi, founded in 2026 on a simple thesis: most AI products bill by token count even though a correct answer and a wrong one cost the same to generate. The founders combine quantitative finance experience at Citadel Securities with product management at fintech Revolut, a pairing that shows up in Touchmark's mix of eval infrastructure and financial derivative products. The platform runs automated evaluations on every output a connected AI product generates, then adjusts what the end customer is billed based on the resulting quality score, discounting or refunding weak outputs and letting strong ones command a slightly higher price. Beyond the billing layer, Touchmark publishes daily industry AI quality indices covering pharma, code, and legal use cases, and that same quality data backs tradable financial instruments: forwards, options, and exchange-listed futures that let institutional buyers hedge on AI output quality over time.
Pricing
Custom pricing, contact-based. No published tiers as of June 2026. Pricing is usage-based, negotiated per AI vendor based on eval volume and billing delta volume. No free tier.
Key Features
- Quality-Adjusted Billing: Every output is scored across 5 eval dimensions, including code quality, instruction following, and hallucination rate, and the price the end customer pays adjusts to match, with weak outputs discounted or refunded automatically.
- 10-Line TypeScript SDK: The @touchmark/sdk npm package drops into an existing AI product in under 10 lines of code: open a session, tag each output with a base price, and apply the quality-adjusted delta Touchmark returns.
- Public Session Pages: Every priced output gets its own URL at sessions.touchmark.ai showing the score breakdown, the price calculation, and a plain-language explanation that end customers can inspect directly.
- Industry AI Quality Indices: Touchmark publishes daily-updated Pharma, Code, and Legal AI quality indices that Fortune 500 procurement teams cite when comparing AI vendor quality.
- Financial Instruments on AI Quality: Forwards, options, and exchange-listed futures settle against Touchmark's eval timeseries, letting institutional buyers and sovereign wealth funds hedge or speculate on AI output quality over time.
- Custom and Third-Party Eval Support: Any deterministic signal or third-party evaluation can plug into Touchmark's [0, 1] scoring scale, letting domain-specific quality criteria influence pricing alongside the default suite.
Pros
- Outcome-based pricing directly cuts AI cost waste: customers pay full price only for outputs that clear an agreed quality threshold, with automatic refunds on poor ones.
- No architectural changes needed for the SDK integration, one of the fastest eval-to-billing setups available in 2026.
- Published industry AI quality indices give enterprise procurement teams a standardized benchmark other eval platforms don't offer.
Cons
- Small, early-stage Y Combinator-backed team with no published pricing, no public compliance certifications, and thin documentation compared to established observability platforms.
- The eval model requires developers to trust Touchmark's default scoring dimensions as fair quality proxies; custom eval integration adds effort for domain-specific use cases.
- Financial derivative products built on AI quality, like futures and options, are novel and largely untested at scale, which will draw regulatory and settlement-risk scrutiny from enterprise legal teams.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Touchmark cost in 2026?
Touchmark has no published pricing tiers; it negotiates a custom, usage-based deal with each AI vendor tied to eval volume and billing-delta volume. There is no self-serve checkout and no free tier, so getting a real number means contacting the team directly. Terms are likely flexible while Touchmark is still onboarding early design partners.
Is Touchmark free to use?
Touchmark has no free plan or trial. It is a B2B tool for AI companies that want quality-based billing for their own customers, not something an individual signs up for solo. The one thing anyone can access without a contract is the public session viewer at sessions.touchmark.ai, where you can inspect how a specific priced output was scored.
What are the best alternatives to Touchmark?
Touchmark has no direct like-for-like competitor on hokai since quality-adjusted billing is a new category, but two adjacent eval tools are worth comparing. Archal, also a 2026 YC company, catches agent failures before they ever reach production; pick it for pre-release testing rather than a live billing layer. Crukx is built for production LLM observability and monitoring, so pick it if you want visibility into running models rather than a system that changes what customers pay.
How does Touchmark compare to Archal in 2026?
Archal and Touchmark are both 2026 Y Combinator eval startups, but they act at different moments in the pipeline. Archal runs agents against sandboxed clones of GitHub, Slack, and Stripe before code ships, catching failures pre-production, and gives builders a free tier of 100 evals. Touchmark instead evaluates live production outputs and uses the resulting score to adjust what the end customer is billed, with no free tier and custom pricing only. Choose Archal to catch agent failures before release; choose Touchmark if you want output quality to directly drive customer billing.
How do you get started with Touchmark?
Touchmark has no public self-serve signup, so getting started begins with contacting the team to join the beta as a design partner. Once approved, integration follows a five-step pattern with the @touchmark/sdk package: install it, create a client with your API key, open a session for each user interaction, tag the output with the price you would normally charge, then apply the returned quality delta to your billing system. Full documentation, including the quickstart and event reference, lives at docs.touchmark.ai.
Top Alternatives
- Archal: Pick Archal if you need pre-production agent testing with a free tier; pick Touchmark if you want live output quality to drive customer billing.
- Crukx: Pick Crukx for general-purpose LLM observability and monitoring; pick Touchmark if you specifically want quality scores to change what customers pay.