2026-11-01

What may go to the cloud: decide per document type, not per company

Running 2,000 documents a month through AI costs under a dollar in the cloud, about the same on EU hosting, and one €3,000 machine locally. Price does not decide where a document goes; the shelf it belongs on does.

What may go to the cloud: decide per document type, not per company

“Can we give this to AI?” gets asked once per company, for every document at once, and the answer is no. A proposal and a contract with personal data get the same answer because they got the same question.

Why it persists

Because the decision is made per company. One rule for everything is the rule for your most sensitive document, and it stops the rest. Our tool matrix has used three levels per document type since July: three shelves.

Three shelves

  1. Standard: public proposals, marketing copy, internal notes without personal data. Cloud, any vendor with a clear retention policy.
  2. Confidential: contracts, HR, finance. A vendor that processes in the EU, keeps inputs for a known period and does not train on them. Three separate lines in the processing agreement: region is not retention, retention is not training.
  3. Regulated: customer personal data, legal or medical privilege. The document stays on your network, on an open model on your own machine.

Write the shelf down per document type: fifteen lines, an afternoon.

What it costs

Take 2,000 documents a month, say 1,500 input and 300 output tokens each. Standard on Claude Haiku 5.5 ($0.10 in, $0.50 out per million tokens; Anthropic pricing, 1 Nov 2026) costs $0.60 a month. Confidential on Mistral Small 4, which hosts data in the EU by default ($0.15 and $0.60; Mistral, 1 Nov 2026), costs $0.81. Regulated: a Mac Studio M5 Max, 36 GB, €2,999 incl. VAT (apple.com/de, 1 Nov 2026), plus about €5 of electricity a month at €0.18/kWh excl. VAT (Eurostat, H1 2026). EU hosting costs nothing extra; the only real gap is the local machine, one purchase rather than a project.

Where it breaks

At sorting. A “standard” email with a customer’s health detail in paragraph two is regulated: the worst field decides the shelf, not the document’s name. In contracts, “servers in the EU” is one line; retention days and training use are the other two. Anthropic offers no EU region in its own API today; Mistral has one by default. The contract tells you that, the price list does not.

Where DIY stops

The shelf list and the purchase are yours. What does not come on its own: a router in front of the API sorting each document by its worst field, and a log of what went where. We build those two, if you want them.

The calculation

Your numbers go here; this is an example, not a promise. Prices as of 1 Nov 2026.

  • Volume: 2,000 documents × (1,500 + 300) tokens = 3.6 million tokens a month.
  • Standard, cloud: 3 M × $0.10 + 0.6 M × $0.50 = $0.60 a month (Anthropic).
  • Confidential, EU hosting: 3 M × $0.15 + 0.6 M × $0.60 = $0.81 a month (Mistral).
  • Regulated, local: €2,999 once (apple.com/de) + roughly 26 kWh × €0.18 = €5 a month (Eurostat).

Price does not say where a document goes. The shelf does.