Even conservatively, these positions represent $800K to $1.2M annually in salary costs alone, before considering benefits, recruiting expenses, audit costs, security tooling, and management overhead.
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Additionally, Knox materially reduces execution risk. They have an established authorization process, a proven track record, and existing expertise that allows our engineering team to focus on building product rather than becoming FedRAMP specialists.

For non-US staff, Knox provides two paths:

1. Trusted Knox Operators: up to 5 named U.S.-based Knox staff listed in the SSP who can act on the customer's behalf.
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2. TechOps: 24/7 operational support with a 15-minute SLA, enabling supervised access for global engineering teams.

Net: yes, they avoid having to stand up a U.S.-person operations team to manage the production environment. All of this is included in the annual cost.
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An equally important consideration is staffing. Without a partner like Knox, we would likely need to recruit experienced federal security and compliance personnel. As our public sector business grows, this may include personnel with security clearances or deep government cloud expertise. These resources are expensive, difficult to hire, and become permanent fixed costs on the balance sheet.
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The more relevant comparison is not $500K versus $0. The comparison is:

Most importantly, every quarter spent building these capabilities internally delays our ability to pursue federal revenue opportunities. The Knox investment is not simply a compliance expense. It is a mechanism for accelerating entry into the federal market while avoiding the cost and complexity of building a dedicated FedRAMP organization from scratch.
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Given the cost of specialized personnel, the ongoing compliance burden, and the value of accelerating federal market access, the Knox partnership represents a lower-cost and lower-risk path than developing equivalent capabilities internally.