There is an idea, made famous by the investor Nick Sleep in his Nomad Investment Partnership letters (2001–2014), called “scale economies shared”. A company that captures a real advantage has a choice: keep the saving as margin, or pass it back to the customer.
Sleep was writing about scale economies. We are applying the same logic to innovation. The ORYL F1’s advantages are real and measurable: roughly 100× less compound required than HPLC-based workflows, a full 384-well plate read in about fifteen minutes, second-harmonic and linear light scattering acquired simultaneously on the same sample. The all-in cost of running a solubility or aggregation measurement on an F1 is, accordingly, dramatically lower than on an HPLC-based one. The ROI calculator on our site walks through the numbers for a typical discovery group.
The question we faced this spring was what to do with the difference. The market rate for an HPLC-CRO solubility measurement is around USD 100 per compound; we could have priced just below it, kept a wide margin on a small service line, and called it a value play. We chose to do the other thing. The published list — Starter at USD 1,500 flat, Standard at USD 50/compound, Campaign at USD 40/compound, HTS at USD 30/compound — is roughly the cost of producing the measurement plus a margin we judge fair. It is an innovation-shared price. The efficiencies the F1 captured come back to the customer as a smaller bill and a faster answer.
We can afford this because we are not the CRO; we are the instrument company. Every customer who runs a measurement with us also helps the F1 become the reference standard in solubility and aggregation profiling, through citations, through downstream instrument adoption, through the technology being normalised in the literature. The value created by the service flows back to ORYL through the technology, not through per-compound margin. A published price, in our case, is a flywheel input, not a concession.
The simpler reason, and the one we would give first in person: we want a graduate student with three tough compounds, an academic group running an 80-compound SAR series, or a small biotech without internal screening capacity to be able to send samples and get an answer in two weeks at a known number. Validation of solubility and aggregation behaviour is not a luxury good. The historical reasons it has been gated behind opaque quoting processes are no longer load-bearing.
I believe innovation that is not shared is, in the end, not innovation; it is a private optimisation. Sleep made this argument about scale. We are making it about innovation. We will get parts of it wrong, and we would like to hear from you when we do.
Notes
Nick Sleep’s “scale economies shared” model is set out across his Nomad Investment Partnership letters (2001–2014); the letters are widely archived online. The ORYL F1 ROI calculator and the published measurement-service tiers are at ORYL Photonics website.
Common questions about the ORYL Measurement Services
ORYL Photonics publishes a price list for its solubility and aggregation measurement service: USD 1,500 flat for the Starter tier (1–15 compounds), USD 50 per compound for the Standard tier (16–99 compounds), USD 40 per compound for the Campaign tier (100–299 compounds), and USD 30 per compound for the HTS tier (300 compounds or more).
The market rate for a solubility and aggregation measurement at an HPLC CRO is around USD 100 per compound, with a four-to-six week turnaround. ORYL’s published rate is USD 30–50 per compound with a two-week turnaround from sample receipt. ORYL F1 is an alternative to HPLC, not a replacement.
The ORYL F1 instrument uses Ultrafast Light Scattering (ULS), which requires approximately 100× less compound than HPLC-based workflows and reads a full 384-well plate in about fifteen minutes. The lower per-measurement unit cost is passed back to the customer as a smaller bill, rather than captured as margin.
Yes. Every customer pays the same published price regardless of company size. The same list applies to an academic group, a two-person biotech, and a global pharma. There is no negotiation.