At a glance

Rising Tide is the incentive plan of the Praxis Partner Program. This page runs from the intent to the split in one line, so every rule shows where it comes from.

The intent

Praxis wants to spend its effort on one thing: building, completing and maintaining the system, and giving the market a platform where agents work continuously in the cloud. Marketing and selling are not part of that. Praxis has no advertising budget and no sales force. The money that would have been spent there is kept and shared with the partners who build the ecosystem together. That is where Rising Tide starts, and every rule below follows from it.

The business itself

The Praxis business is simple: buy models, sandboxes, search and compute upstream, and sell them to customers by usage. Prices sit under an umbrella. The top is the vendor's list price, and the Praxis price is always below it. A partner who could only sell at the Praxis price would have no reason to exist, so partners set their own prices, with one limit: never above the Praxis price. Top to bottom it is one chain: the list price is above the Praxis price, and the Praxis price is at or above the partner's price. The share comes out of the platform's procurement margin, not the customer's price; a customer never pays more through you than directly, and any further discount comes out of your share.

What upstream looks like

A model passes through three layers before it reaches a customer. At the top is the model vendor, which trains the model and serves inference. In the middle is MaaS, model as a service: the vendor's own API or a cloud platform, supplying compute and an interface. Praxis is the third layer, the router: one address for every model, one routing layer, one bill. Praxis's upstream is MaaS.

Upstream prices to Praxis are not one uniform discount. They differ by model and by volume, and are often negotiated model by model. So every model has its own margin, and that is where "thin" and "thick" come from.

From margin to pool

The customer's usage revenue at the Praxis price, minus upstream cost, is the margin. The margin cannot all be shared. Praxis first deducts the losses of that business: taxes, payment fees, chargebacks and refunds, foreign exchange, retries. What remains is the contribution margin in accounting terms; Rising Tide calls it the pool. There is one pool per customer, per model, per month. The platform keeps one floor: the pool must not be negative. A negative model is not sold at the uniform discount; it is sold at list, renegotiated upstream or withdrawn, and no other model subsidises it.

Why pools are thin or thick

Upstream decides the thickness. Models with scarce, heavy compute get shallow upstream discounts, so their pools are thin. Open-source models and models in ample supply get deep discounts, so their pools are thick. Within one customer's month, both kinds usually appear together.

How the pool is split, and why

The rule follows the thickness. Thin pool: all of it is yours and Praxis keeps nothing; any pool below 5% of usage revenue is thin. Thick pool: you and Praxis take half each; any pool above 10% of usage revenue is thick. In between, you receive a fixed 5% of usage revenue.

A thin pool goes entirely to you because a thin pool means Praxis has no volume on that model yet and no bargaining power with the supplier. What the platform needs most then is volume, so it gives the whole pool to whoever brings it and takes nothing: zero margin in exchange for volume. A thick pool is split because a thick pool means the discount has been negotiated, and that is what volume bought. The platform then takes the share it is due, to build and maintain the system, so the pool is halved. The 5% floor in between keeps your income from dropping as a model moves from one state to the other. Two faces of one rule: the platform yields until there is volume, and everyone shares once there is.

The 5% floor is set at the industry's resale margin: pure cloud resale earns high single digits, and double-digit margins come from value-added services¹; the model aggregator OpenRouter passes vendor prices through and charges 5.5% only on top-ups². What differs in Rising Tide is that on a thin pool the 5% is all yours, and on a thick pool you take half.

In the figure, the horizontal axis is the pool as a share of usage revenue and the vertical axis is what you receive. The left segment follows the pool one for one, the middle is flat at 5%, and the right rises at half slope. The curve never falls: a thicker pool never lowers your share.

More volume, thicker pools

The volume you bring lets Praxis negotiate deeper upstream discounts, discounts thicken the pool, and a thick pool is split in half with you. That is the rising tide that lifts every boat. Tiers are designed and not yet enabled: once they are, a higher share applies to the part of your monthly consumed revenue above each threshold, with 90 days' notice.

Why everything is public

Margins at the resale layer are thin and reasonable across the whole industry, as the numbers above show. Praxis never planned to earn much at this layer; the platform's profit comes from the agent layer above it. With nothing in the books worth hiding, opening them costs nothing and buys trust: you need not guess what the platform keeps, and customers know that buying through you costs nothing extra. Research reaches the same conclusion: a seller that discloses its cost structure gains trust when the margin is seen as reasonable³, and in long-term relationships where the other side can help cut costs, open books work better than secrecy⁴. When you see that a model's pool is thin, you know Praxis has no bargaining power on that channel; if you have a better one, you bring it, and a thicker pool pays you more too.

Transparency has a boundary. Real models' pools appear only on your statement after signing, for your own customers, under the confidentiality clause of the agreement; the public pages carry rules and illustrative numbers only. Signed partners are covered by parameter-change protection: any change to the floor, the split or the tier thresholds comes with 90 days' written notice, and existing customers settle on the old parameters for 12 months.

The next page turns this line into money across four illustrative months: Earnings examples.

References

Footnotes

1. CRN, "5 Ways To Drive AWS Partner Profits, 60 Percent Margins": the article quotes AWS's partner lead putting pure resale margins at "high single digits, maybe low double digits"; the 60% in the title refers to managed and outcome-based services. Accessed 2026-09-22. ↩

2. OpenRouter Docs FAQ (openrouter.ai/docs/faq): 5.5% top-up fee, vendor pricing passed through without markup. Accessed 2026-09-22. ↩

3. Mohan, B., Buell, R. W. & John, L. K. "Lifting the Veil: The Benefits of Cost Transparency", Marketing Science, 2020. ↩

4. Kajüter, P. & Kulmala, H. I. "Open-book accounting in networks: Potential achievements and reasons for failures", Management Accounting Research, 2005. ↩