Who made this, and why

Anil Dania has spent his career in outsourcing and vendor governance. He has built and run contact centre operations, and governed large outsourced trust and safety programmes for global platforms.

That work included cost models for around twenty outsourcing partners, business cases for new sites across five continents, and a should-cost model taken through live vendor renegotiation.

This taxonomy comes out of that work. It exists because the instruments used to buy this service could not answer basic questions about what it costs, and nobody had published a structure that could.

The vantage point, stated plainly

This is a buyer's view. It was built from the client side of the table, governing outsourced operations and taking apart vendor rates. That shapes what it sees clearly and what it sees less well.

Two consequences worth stating. Client-side governance cost is included, because leaving it out is the most common structural bias in vendor-supplied cost models and it always favours the vendor. And vendor margin is isolated rather than spread across every line, because a framework that smears margin cannot answer the most useful question a buyer has.

None of that makes it an anti-vendor instrument. Structural transparency is a precondition for outcome-based pricing, which providers generally want too. A provider who can show a structured cost build wins on credibility against one who quotes a rate.

What this practice does

Cost of Trust is an independent advisory practice working on the commercial mechanics of trust and safety operations: cost diagnostics, vendor selection and renegotiation support, and fractional advisory for teams carrying this spend without a dedicated commercial function.

The taxonomy is free and stays free. It is published in full, under an open licence, with the reasoning behind every boundary call included so it can be argued with.

How the framework is maintained

Revised annually. Every change is recorded in the changelog inside the workbook, along with what adopters need to re-map. Codes are never reused or renumbered, and a retired code stays retired, because people will have mapped real cost bases against them.