How an agency buys VECTR. Licence it in-house, or commission the answer.
VECTR is New Zealand's economics platform: scenario analysis across the whole economy, run as a deterministic program your team licenses in-house — or commissioned from ours. Someone will ask you what it costs, which budget it comes from, and what happens to your work if we're gone. Answered here in that order, in a form you can lift into a paper.
For the person making the case internally — a GM, a chief economist, a procurement lead.
Two ways to have it — and what each costs.
Two routes. Which one fits is a conversation, not a form:
Licence it, run it in-house
An annual subscription, priced per organisation, for teams that will ask questions regularly. Your own analysts run the program — console, API or command line — and the answers are theirs. Term and renewal are set with you — they affect how the procurement is valued, so it is worth a conversation early (see the threshold).
Commission the answer from us
Priced per question, for one paper, business case or consent application. No subscription, nothing to administer. You get the report, the specification that produced it, and the run ID that lets anyone pull the same numbers back.
Flexible, inclusive pricing
We're confident there's a right-sized solution for your particular problem. Send us an email and we can work out what fits.
Which budget line it sits on.
This usually decides how hard the internal path is, so it's worth getting right before the first conversation rather than after it. In the order most agencies find easiest:
ICT or software subscription
The natural home for a subscription, and the line procurement expects a tool like this to arrive on.
The policy-advice baseline
Where an agency already funds its own analytical capability. This is the accurate description of what VECTR does: it makes the advice your team is already giving more defensible.
Data or information services
Some agencies carry this separately. Where it exists, it's often the shortest queue.
A specific project's budget
An infrastructure business case, a consenting application, a particular Cabinet paper. Cleanest where the question belongs to one piece of work.
One note worth making plainly: this is not consultancy spend, and it shouldn't be coded as it. Nobody is being brought in to write your advice. You are either licensing an instrument your own analysts run, or buying a computed answer — and in both cases the advice built on it is yours.
Engaging us under the open-advertising threshold.
You know your own rules better than we do, and your procurement team will apply them. This is simply how we shape a first arrangement so it stays straightforward for you.
Under the Government Procurement Rules, an agency must openly advertise on GETS where the maximum total estimated value of a procurement reaches $100,000 for goods and services. That value is assessed over the whole of life of the resulting contracts, and it includes the value of options to extend or buy more.
The practical consequence catches people out: a three-year arrangement is valued as three years, not as one. Term length and renewal shape that total, so it is worth settling early with your procurement team — talk to us and we will fit the contract to whatever they need it to be.
Above the threshold, the open process applies normally and we'll respond to it like any other supplier.
Your procurement team has the final word
The reading above is ours. Where your procurement team reads the Rules differently, theirs governs.
The economic-benefit statement, written for the evaluator.
For procurements above the threshold, the 5th edition of the Rules (in force from 1 December 2025) requires economic benefit to New Zealand to be evaluated, with a minimum weighting of 10% of the evaluation criteria.
Evaluation teams are still settling how to score that, and most suppliers leave them to invent the rationale. We'd rather hand it over in a form that can be scored directly. Ours is short and checkable:
New Zealand owned and based
A New Zealand company, with the intellectual property held here rather than licensed in from an overseas parent.
Built on New Zealand data
Calculated from New Zealand sources under their published licences — not an overseas model rescaled to fit. The sources →
Open to being checked here
The method is published so New Zealand agencies and researchers can examine it, including the checks that don't pass. The method →
Ask us and we'll send this as a one-page attachment you can put straight into an evaluation pack.
What happens to your work if we're not here.
Procurement asks the continuity question on every checklist, and it is a fair question to ask any supplier. The answers exist before you ask for them.
Source-available under licence
The engine is source-available to licensees under its licence terms. Not open source — the terms are real — but you are not buying a box you can never look inside.
Code escrow
Escrow with an independent agent, released to you on the conditions written into your contract. Standard, and we'll sign it.
Data exit
A data-exit clause in every agreement. Your scenarios and your results come out in an open format, on request, without a negotiation about it.
You keep your library
Every run you have made or commissioned, and every report produced from it, remains yours to hold and to re-publish — each still carrying its run ID.
The three questions your assurance people will ask.
Your privacy officer, your legal team and your chief economist each have one. You can pre-clear all three in a corridor with these.
“Does it touch personal information?” VECTR runs on published aggregate statistics, not on records about people. Results for small populations are suppressed automatically before they reach you — that suppression is a legal requirement, not a setting someone can switch off. Data & legal →
“Is this an AI system we have to assess?” No. VECTR is deterministic code — the same question returns the same answer, and there is no model making a judgement inside it. That usually changes which assurance pathway this enters, so it's worth establishing early. Why it isn't AI →
“Who signs the number?” A named person at Danalytics Consulting Ltd (Danalytics) signs the number, in writing, and will defend it if it is challenged. Every run also mints a run ID, printed on the report as a 2D barcode: scan it and the exact specification behind that number can be pulled back and re-run — the week after, or two years later when someone asks again. Prove It, coming next, returns the full derivation of any output back to checkable public data.
Where to start.
The cheapest first step is not a procurement at all — it's a question. Send us the one you actually need answered, and we'll come back with exactly what answering it takes — so the case you make internally starts from something real, sized to your question.
Or write to [email protected]. A person reads it.