$5.3M is the easy number. The hard number is the year you lose finding, hiring, and onboarding the people who were supposed to give you that year back.
Somebody on a YPO forum asked me to prove the AOS pricing was not a stunt. So I built the comparison plan. The dollar number is below. The reason you should not run the plan is the second half.
Dollars, sourced
61 roles, fully loaded, at US-remote senior-IC rates. Base $50,000 per role, which is intentionally low to be charitable to the comparison since most of these would actually pay $90K to $180K. Benefits and payroll tax at 25 percent of base. Tooling per seat at $4,000 per year for laptops, software, observability, and comms. Recruiting at $20,000 per hire, blending recruiter fee, internal time, and the candidate experience cost.
Per role, year one: $50,000 + $12,500 + $4,000 + $20,000 = $86,500. Across 61 roles, $5,276,500. Round to $5.3M.
This is the floor. Real numbers, if you actually tried to hire 61 seniors in a year, run two to three times higher because real senior pay is real senior pay and you cannot recruit a Brand Lead for $50K base without a story.
Time, which is the part people skip
Average time-to-hire for a senior IC in 2025 is 42 to 60 days. Average time-to-productive at a small company is another 60 to 90 days after they start. Combined, that is 102 to 150 days from job-opens to net-positive.
If you hire all 61 in parallel, which you cannot, the team is up and running about 5 months after the hiring sprint begins. In reality you sequence the hires because you do not have a recruiter for each role and you do not have onboarding bandwidth for 61 simultaneous starts. A realistic sequence is 4 to 6 hires per month for a small company. At 6 per month, 61 hires takes ten months of hiring activity. Add 3 months of ramp on the last cohort. You are 13 or 14 months from a fully-up team.
What you do for those 14 months
You are the routing department, which is the previous essay in this series. Work the new team will eventually own is still on you. Drafts you would not need to write. Calls you would not need to take. Decisions you would not need to make. The new hires are net-negative for the first 30 days because you are training them.
If the average founder spends 20 hours a week routing (most of the founders I have talked to clock higher than that), 14 months is roughly 1,200 hours of your time that does not go into the four or five things only you can do.
The opportunity cost of those 1,200 hours is the price you actually pay for the hiring plan. The dollar number is incidental.
What the comparable AOS spend looks like
Install: $1,000, one time. Hosted maintenance: $100 per month. Token usage on top, your own ledger, hard-capped, visible at any time. Provisioning: 20 minutes.
By the end of the day you would have signed offer letter number one in the hiring plan, AOS is running. Eight departments. 61 specialist roles. Mission system. Five gates. Operating memory. The Friday summary lands at the end of the week.
The honest comparison is not $5.3M versus $2,200. It is 14 months versus one afternoon. 1,200 founder hours versus the half hour you spent reading the install instructions.
When the hiring plan is actually the right call
If your business depends on a human relationship that does not delegate, the hiring plan is wrong but AOS is also wrong. You are running a personal practice and you should price like one.
If regulation requires a licensed human signature on every work product (some legal, some medical, some financial advisory), the hiring plan is mandatory. Use AOS as the layer underneath the licensed human, not instead of them.
Most founder-led companies fit neither shape. They fit the shape where the founder is the bottleneck on routine ops work that does not require a human signature. For those companies, the hiring plan is the wrong answer almost always, and most of them know it. They run the plan anyway because hiring is what founders are trained to do.