[C6 HL-042] Plan finance, unit economics, procurement, and sustainability #52

Outcome

Understand the cost and operational capacity of the chosen practice/product.

Placement and activation

• Circle: C6 — Sustainable commercial and institutional operation
• System responsibilities: Corporate / Commercial
• Capability coverage: 10 Billing, Entitlements & Monetization; 12 Growth, Analytics & Experimentation; 15 Legal, Compliance & Corporate
• Planning status: Conditional; activate only when the requirement below is met.
• Activation: Actual operation, demand, a proposed commission, or institutional use requires a cost, funding, procurement, or sustainability decision.
• Parent epic: [EPIC C6] Sustainable commercial and institutional operation #9; master roadmap: [MASTER EPIC] Hole-loop: concentric evolution within Persona / Visual Form Canon #2.

Dependencies

Required prerequisites:

• A defined operating, commission, institutional, or product scenario; named budget/cost owner; observed costs or clearly labeled estimates; and the funding/demand assumption to be tested.
• Relevant process ownership and systems of record from HL-004 #13.

Conditional inputs:

• HL-037 #47 supplies a chosen price, offer, and billing/fulfillment flows when they exist. Cost and viability work can precede or run alongside offer validation so it can inform pricing; billing implementation is not a prerequisite.
• HL-041 #51 supplies applicable contract, tax/accounting ownership, vendor, and venue responsibility decisions before commitments are made.
• HL-034 #44 and HL-035 #45 supply actual runtime/availability cost assumptions if those services are selected.

A free artwork or offline educational edition can have a bounded cost/sustainability review without subscriptions, accounts, or service infrastructure. Complete the finance processes applicable to the selected funding/operation model.

Acceptance evidence

• Model storage, bandwidth, inference, venue/equipment, labor, support, vendor and delivery costs; compare pricing/commission income with actual fulfillment cost.
• Assign systems of record and ownership for accounting, invoicing/reconciliation, tax, revenue recognition, forecasting, procurement and budget approvals as applicable.
• Define cash/cost reporting, spending boundaries, vendor renewal/exit and financial record retention; use suitable existing services rather than an unnecessary finance repository.
• Run a scenario for demand, outage/overrun and a small commission/service delivery; document viability and capacity constraints.
• Record a sustainability decision and next review trigger using observed demand/costs instead of invented growth targets.

Completion and scope

Attach the actual artifact or commit, relevant verification, limitations, and an artist decision where a composition changes. This issue plans authorized work; creation does not claim implementation or deployment. Preserve independent work/source identities and private source boundaries. Repository creation requires the extraction evidence in HL-004 #13 and HL-045 #14.