Measure what your AI spend produces — not what it burns.

The name is the thesis

TIER — Token Impact & Efficiency Ratio

A double meaning, on purpose. It is the ratio — impact over efficiency, shipped outcomes over dollars, computed and re-derivable. And it is the tier — one comparable grade for how well spend becomes real work, so you can finally compare on efficiency instead of usage.

The problem

Everyone is spending on AI. Almost no one can say what it bought.

Token budgets are being written into job offers. Consumption leaderboards are celebrated. And the honest answer to "what are we getting for it?" is still a usage chart.

This is the fourth time the industry has tried to measure engineering. The first three metrics were gamed and abandoned. Read the 60-year lineage — and why TIER is different →

How it works

A meter, not a model. Three moving parts.

No LLM sits in the scoring path. Same inputs, same score, re-derivable from the stored rows — a number you can defend in a leadership meeting.

Unit — outcome points per $1,000 of spend. Ship 100 weighted points on $1,000 and you score 100. Spend $10,000 for the same work and you score 10. The same work for $250 scores 400.

The full method — how the score is computed →

Measured by TIER

We point the meter at ourselves.

TIER's own numbers, computed by TIER on the repository that builds it — including the part most tools would rather hide. Trailing 30-day window, as of 2026-07-21.

Snapshot: trailing 30 days to 2026-07-21. Re-derivable from the shipped evidence — the window moves, so the figure moves with it.

And 72.1% of that spend was unattributed — not yet tied to a merged issue, exactly as the board above reports it. We show our own waste, because that's the number that makes us spend better. Most dashboards would hide it.

Who it's for

Three buyers, three vocabularies, one number.

See how each team uses TIER →

Get better, not graded

Grade the work, not the worker.

Every prior metric graded the developer — and got gamed within a review cycle. TIER grades the work: outcome per dollar. The same number, in the open — so it guides how you optimize spend, not how you judge people.

Honest by design: yield reflects task mix and context, not raw talent — a senior untangling legacy code can score below a junior on greenfield. TIER is a lever for optimizing spend, and it ships its own guidance that it is not a performance-appraisal input.

Why you can trust the number

Built to be read by the people it measures.

The audience is skeptical engineering and finance leadership. They will read the source. So the argument is architecture, not "trust us."

Honest note we volunteer: DORA has 39,000+ data points of validation; TIER is early. We win on the fact that nothing else measures this at all — and on being checkable.