Troy Hicks
Founder, CostFunction
30 years in Digital Asset Management. From film sets to Fortune 500 enterprises, I've spent my career helping teams organize, understand, and extract value from visual content at scale.
Why CostFunction Exists
“After managing millions of assets, I kept seeing the same problem — teams couldn't make informed decisions about AI providers. They'd pick one based on hype, blow their budget, and start over. I built CostFunction so nobody has to guess anymore.”
When large language models gained vision capabilities, everything changed for Digital Asset Management. Suddenly AI could describe, categorize, and extract insights from images at scale. But with GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and dozens of other models competing for attention, choosing the right one became its own problem.
The benchmarks published by AI companies are impressive but generic. Your use case isn't generic. Your images aren't generic. Your budget isn't infinite. CostFunction lets you test with your actual images and get real numbers — so you can make the right call before committing.
30 Years in the Making
My career in Digital Asset Management has taken me through some of the most demanding media environments in the world — places where getting asset management wrong costs millions.
Apple
Managing visual assets at a company where every pixel matters and brand consistency is non-negotiable.
Nike
Global campaigns producing thousands of assets daily across every market and channel.
Boeing
Technical documentation and visual assets where accuracy and compliance are life-critical.
Amazon
Product imagery at unprecedented scale — millions of SKUs, each needing accurate, searchable metadata.
Through all of it, one challenge kept coming back: understanding what's actually in the images. Early in my career that meant manual tagging. Then NLP and machine learning. Now it's multimodal LLMs — and the question isn't whether AI can analyze images, but which AI does it best for your specific needs and budget.
The Philosophy
Your time is worth more than running manual tests.
What takes hours should take minutes.
Real data beats marketing claims.
Test with your images, get your numbers.
Cost matters.
A model that's 5% better but 10x more expensive might not be the right choice.
Tools should be simple.
No setup, no integration headaches. Upload, test, decide.
Get In Touch
CostFunction is built for developers, product managers, and anyone who needs to make smart decisions about LLM model selection. Have questions? Ideas? Feedback?
Broc
Head of Morale
Every company needs someone who keeps spirits high, never complains about code reviews, and ensures the founder takes regular walk breaks. That's Broc — a rescued Cane Corso who takes his role very seriously from his office under my desk.
Broc approved this message.
Stop guessing. Start knowing.