Calculator
Tangos Cost & Build Math
Quantify the hiring curve — and the build vs buy decision — for an autonomous financial-crime investigation platform.
Confidential · April 2026
Avoid the hiring curve

How many analysts does Tangos save you from hiring?

Plug in your monthly investigation volume. Without Tangos, every additional case adds to the hiring curve. With Tangos, your team handles more — without growing at the same rate.

Investigation volume per month

Total investigations per month
Breakdown by case type
EDD
AML L2/L3
Sanctions L2/L3
Annual savings
Cost reduction
Year 1 ROI
Without Tangos
Senior analysts
Junior analysts
Overhead 40% (benefits, space)
Total annual cost
Per investigation
With Tangos
Senior analysts
Junior analysts
Overhead 40% (benefits, space)
Tangos subscription
Total annual cost
Per investigation
The hiring curve

Methodology & assumptions

How we calculate the savings

Click any assumption to expand the logic and tune.

01 Team staffing 6 SR + 11 JR · $1,600,000 / yr

Manual team scales with case volume. Each case type takes a different amount of analyst time:

EDD · 12 hrs   ·   AML L2/L3 · 8 hrs   ·   Sanctions L2/L3 · 5 hrs

At 130 productive hours per FTE per month (after meetings, training, PTO, alert triage, ad-hoc work), total monthly hours ÷ capacity gives total FTEs needed. Team splits 35% senior / 65% junior, which matches what most US institutions actually run.

Floor staffing: 1 senior + 1 junior on both sides at very low volumes (2 FTEs minimum). Even a small investigation function needs at least one senior reviewer and one analyst.

Manual operations scale aggressively in the first 150 cases / month — the manual floor adds 1 FTE per ~25-case threshold, because a small team can't actually absorb that growth without hiring. At 25 cases the floor is 3 FTEs; at 75, 5 FTEs; at 125, 7 FTEs. Above 150, natural team-size calc takes over.

Tangos stays at the 2-FTE floor through this entire range — the platform absorbs the ramp. Differentiation is visible from the first investigation.

Hours per EDD case
Hours per AML L2/L3 case
Hours per Sanctions L2/L3 case
Productive hrs / FTE / month
Senior mix %
Senior loaded cost / yr
Junior loaded cost / yr
02 Overhead rate 40%

Percentage applied to direct labor cost to capture indirect costs: benefits, office space, IT support, training, and management overhead. 40% is a common assumption for US financial institutions. Applied to all analyst labor on both sides.

Overhead %
03 Tangos productivity multiplier 4× per analyst

Each Tangos-equipped analyst handles ~4× the cases of a manual analyst. Tangos automates the routine investigation steps — data gathering, screening, narrative drafting, packaging — so analysts spend their time on judgment and complex cases instead of toil. Your Tangos team is therefore ~1/4 the size of an equivalent manual team for the same volume.

Conservative: 2.5–3×. Aggressive: 5–6×. Your actual multiplier depends on case mix, complexity, integration depth, and adoption maturity.

The hiring curve story: manual operations need 1 more FTE per ~21 additional cases / month. Tangos at 4× productivity needs 1 more FTE per ~84 cases / month. As volume grows, the gap widens — that's where the savings come from.

Productivity multiplier
04 Tangos subscription $40,000 / mo · Growth tier

Subscription scales with case volume. Four tiers cover small, mid-market, growth, and enterprise banks:

Starter
< 25 / mo
$15K / mo
Small
25–49 / mo
$25K / mo
Growth
50–99 / mo
$30K / mo
Enterprise
100+ / mo
$40K / mo

Subscription auto-tiers based on your volume. You can still override below for a custom price — but moving the volume slider will re-tier.

Subscription / month
Build vs buy

What does it cost to build this?

An autonomous financial crime investigation platform takes engineering, domain expertise, and a data foundation — recurring, year over year. Plug in your build assumptions and see the math against Tangos.

Your engineering build-out

ML engineers
ML scientists
Platform engineers
Total engineering FTEs 6
Engineering labor / yr $960,000
Cost reduction
Specialized hires avoided
3-year savings
Build (in-house)
Year 1 run-rate · recurring
ML engineers
ML scientists
Platform engineers
Domain expertise
Overhead 40% (benefits, space)
Data & infrastructure
licensing + curation + validation
Year 1 total
Time to first investigation12–18 months
Buy (Tangos)
Year 1 cost · ships day 1
Annual subscription
Tangos investigation platform
Year 1 total
Time to first investigation2–4 weeks
The build math

Methodology & assumptions

How we calculate the build cost

These figures reflect the recurring run-rate of operating a Tangos-equivalent platform internally. Building isn't a one-time cost — it's a recurring investment as models drift, data sources change, regulations evolve, and key team members leave. Year-one total is the floor, not the ceiling.

01 Engineering team 6 FTEs · $960,000 / yr

Building Tangos's investigation platform requires deep ML expertise across NLP (case narratives), graph reasoning (entity networks), and decisioning under regulatory constraint. The default 4 ML engineers + 1 ML scientist + 1 platform engineer is the minimum to ship a usable v1 in 12–18 months — and what's required to maintain it thereafter.

Salaries shown are base only. Overhead (benefits, equity, space, IT) is applied separately at 40% in assumption #02.

ML engineer base / yr
ML scientist base / yr
Platform engineer base / yr
02 Overhead rate 40%

Percentage applied to direct labor cost to capture indirect costs: benefits, equity, office space, IT support, training, recruiting, and management overhead. 40% is a common assumption for US tech-and-financial-services compensation. Applied to all labor (engineering + domain expertise).

Overhead %
03 Domain expertise 1 ex-regulator · $250,000 / yr

To meet examiner expectations, you need someone who has lived through SAR/EFR submission and OFAC enforcement actions — not just observed them. Ex-regulators with OFAC or Treasury AML leadership experience are a market of roughly a dozen people in the US. Compensation reflects the scarcity.

Tangos has this expertise embedded in the platform's reasoning, review workflows, and audit trails. Building from scratch requires sourcing it directly — this isn't a cost you can engineer around.

Ex-regulators on staff
Ex-regulator base / yr
04 Data & infrastructure $500,000 / yr

Investigation models require commercial data licensing (LexisNexis, Refinitiv World-Check, D&B, sanctions feeds), training-data curation across 15+ specialized domains (typologies, jurisdictions, beneficial ownership, etc.), and continuous validation & recalibration as regulations and adversary patterns shift.

All three are recurring. Models degrade within months without active maintenance — this is not a one-time investment.

Commercial data licensing / yr
Training-data curation / yr
Validation & recalibration / yr
05 Tangos subscription $480,000 / yr

Annual cost of the Tangos investigation platform. $40,000 / month represents the Enterprise tier (100+ investigations / month). Smaller tiers exist at $15K / $25K / $30K monthly for Starter, Small, and Growth-stage banks. Final pricing depends on case volume and is tailored during commercial discussions.

Annual subscription
Tangos Calculator · April 2026 · Confidential
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