What Owning FactoryOS Looks Like After Delivery
The interesting questions about a $50,000 appliance start after the delivery truck leaves. Who updates it, what happens when hardware dies, and what it costs to keep -- those are year-two questions, and they deserve answers before year one begins.
What arrives is covered on its own page. This page is about what living with it is like.
No Meter No Renewal
Nothing about ownership recurs. There is no subscription keeping the system alive, no per-seat license as the office grows, and no support contract required for a box that is just sitting there working.
The license is perpetual. If the invoice for year two is the number you are looking for, it is zero -- power runs about $175 a year, and that is the bill.
Updates Are Included
Updates are included with the license, and they carry new functionality. Applying them is always your choice; declining one never turns anything off.
Plenty of businesses run the same software for a decade because their processes are built on it. That is a legitimate way to own FactoryOS too -- the version you bought keeps working for as long as you choose to run it.
When you do want an update, delivery matches your setup. On the Private AI Office it can be applied directly over the tunnel once you grant a key, or arrive as a download your own people apply; on the Sovereign tier it travels the way the box did -- your staff, a scheduled visit, or a round trip.
When Hardware Fails
The hardware carries NVIDIA's manufacturer warranty, and Comptrio made the purchase, so Comptrio facilitates the claim. A failed unit ships out or a replacement ships in, and any new hardware comes through Comptrio for install and setup before it goes back to work.
On the Sovereign tier, failure is not even downtime. The tier ships as a working pair, and either machine can run the office alone, so a dead box is a rollover while its twin carries the load.
Your Backups Are the Plan
The disk is TPM-bound to the machine and encrypted at rest, so a drive pulled from a dead unit is unreadable anywhere else. That is a security guarantee with a flip side worth stating plainly: the disk is not your recovery plan, your backups are.
Backups live on your infrastructure, under your control. The needs interview covers storage and off-device use before delivery, so the backup plan is designed in rather than discovered during a bad week.
The Minutes It Takes
Day-to-day administration is office-manager work, not an IT hire -- minutes a week, plus a written plan for the rare bad day. The system queues under heavy load instead of crashing, so the bad days are rarer than the phrase suggests.
The machine also does not age the way the fear assumes. The same silicon inherits better models, so the box improves over its life instead of merely surviving it.
Growing Beyond the Box
Most offices never outgrow one machine, because capacity is peak concurrency, not headcount. When growth is real, it is hardware you buy, not a tier you upgrade into -- scoped the same way the first box was.
Ownership also compounds in the other direction. The platform is built to be built on, so custom workflows and applications on top of your install are ordinary follow-on engagements, not renegotiations.
Ownership Is the Quiet Part
A cloud subscription demands attention every month: invoices, renewals, price changes, deprecations. An owned box mostly asks to be left alone -- it works nights, prepares mornings, and bills nobody.
That is the honest picture of year two. If it sounds like the relationship you want with your infrastructure, start with the needs interview.