CalHFA’s RFP for an IT service management system asks bidders for consumption pricing and attaches a contract form that caps total payment. Section 4.2.3 requires SKU-level pricing, consumption pricing, uplift caps, and a three-year total cost of ownership, and Section 3.1.9 requires disclosure of AI consumption pricing down to token or credit models, metering rules, rate limits, and future cost escalators. Exhibit D, the agency’s standard service agreement, states that the amounts provided are the contractor’s entire remuneration and that total payment will in no event exceed a dollar figure to be filled in. It is a draft template written for hourly billing, and I do not know how CalHFA will adapt it for a subscription. Section 4.2.6 calls its terms generally non-negotiable and tells a bidder who objects to a provision to name it, and explain why, in a separate document titled “Exceptions to Service Agreement.”
The RFP does not supply monthly AI usage volumes. Section 2.2 gives 225 to 240 employees, 31 of them IT staff, and says vendors must use those figures for licensing estimates and AI consumption forecasting. Expected ticket volumes, agent counts, environment counts, and monthly volumes appear in Section 3.8, inside a discovery questionnaire and a discovery workbook that the RFP lists as deliverables of the selected vendor. Section 4.2, which enumerates what a proposal must contain, lists neither.
The price is due September 29 on a schedule the procurement page marks as updated September 10. Questions closed September 8, Section 4.1.1 accepts no follow-up questions, and consolidated answers are due by September 22. CalHFA reserves the right to request more information from any respondent, but a bidder cannot count on that request.
The decision I would make now is to write the AI consumption line as a rate multiplied by a stated monthly volume derived from the Section 2.2 headcount and explicit assumptions about use, and to put that arithmetic in the cost section. Then decide whether you can absorb usage above that estimate. If you can, propose a not-to-exceed total based on that volume and accept the cost of higher usage. Otherwise, file the exceptions document against the entire-remuneration clause and propose what happens to the metered component when usage reaches the cap. What I would not do is submit a rate with no stated volume into a contract form that caps total payment and count on the negotiation that Section 5.2.1 reserves for the best-qualified vendor. A bidder does not know on September 29 whether it will be in that negotiation, and the answers due September 22 may or may not touch the cap.