Trust & Safety Cost Taxonomy
Version 1.0. A shared structure for counting what trust and safety costs, so that two organisations can compare their numbers and mean the same thing.
Download
Twelve tabs. Nine cost domains, around sixty line items at three levels, the dimensions applied to every amount, the reporting conventions, a mapping worksheet with built in validation, and an hours bridge. Start here.
A complete mapping of a fictional platform, 65 lines including the awkward ones: a credit note, a vendor that refused a rate build-up, contingent exposure, an unallocatable recharge. Every figure is invented and none is a benchmark.
Two pages. What it is, why it exists, what it gets you, who it is for, and how to use it.
One page. Nine steps from a blank sheet to a mapped cost base, including how to get at cost sitting inside shared engineering, legal and data teams.
What is inside
| TS-100 | Policy and standards | 4 line items |
| TS-200 | Detection and tooling | 7 line items |
| TS-300 | Human review operations | 8 line items |
| TS-400 | Quality and calibration | 4 line items |
| TS-500 | Workforce enablement | 6 line items |
| TS-600 | Wellness and resiliency | 5 line items |
| TS-700 | Governance, regulatory and transparency | 6 line items |
| TS-800 | Vendor and program management | 5 line items |
| TS-900 | Transition and lifecycle | 5 line items |
| TS-000 | Unallocated, kept deliberately visible | 1 line item |
Every amount also carries a cost element, a basis, a confidence tag, a delivery mode, four geography axes, and where relevant a modality, harm type and severity band.
How to use it
- Read the reporting conventions and write down your scope boundary. Thirty minutes, and the step that decides whether the answer means anything.
- Assemble the cost base. The ledger and the invoices are the easy part. The value is in the cost sitting inside shared engineering, legal, policy and data teams, and in your own governance time.
- Map every line, code it, and fill in the hours bridge. Anything you cannot defensibly place goes to the unallocated bucket rather than to a convenient neighbour.
- Run the built in checks. Then ask what the structure makes possible: where the money really goes, what the margin is, what leaving would cost, and what protection is costing.
Seven codes have no invoice behind them and are the reason most reported trust and safety cost is too low. The workbook gives a method, a fallback and a boundary test for each one.
A note on the wellness domain
Codes TS-610 to TS-650 name the cost of protecting the people who do this work, including the cost of harm that has already occurred. They exist so that reducing a protection has to be argued out loud rather than achieved by moving a utilisation figure.
Naming a cost is not an invitation to remove it. An unnamed cost is the one that gets cut without a conversation.
Licence and citation
The structure, definitions and conventions are released under CC BY 4.0: free to use, adapt and build on, with attribution. Any figures you enter into the workbook are yours and are not covered by that licence.
That DOI always resolves to the newest version. To cite version 1.0 specifically, use 10.5281/zenodo.22261376.
This structure is revised annually. The changelog inside the workbook records every change and what adopters need to re-map. Codes are never reused or renumbered, because people will have mapped real cost bases against them.
Tell me what is wrong with it
If a line item is missing, a boundary is wrong, or something in your cost base will not map, that is the most useful thing you can send back. It goes into the next version, with acknowledgement.