Case study: RegWatch — how 6 agents power an 80%-margin compliance service

A compliance-monitoring OPC where a 6-agent pipeline auto-produces daily briefings. $5/mo per customer, a 5,000-customer target, under 15 minutes of human work per day.

RegWatch was the first vertical OPC we validated in the MVP phase: a compliance-monitoring service for outbound businesses. Its value isn’t complexity — it’s that it proved the unit economics of “one person + a set of agents = a team” in the plainest possible terms.

The problem it solves

Outbound SMBs must keep watching regulators — US EPA/FDA, EU GDPR and more — but a compliance team is expensive. RegWatch turns this into a subscription:

• Price: $5 / month / customer
• Target scale: 5,000 customers
• Gross margin: ~80% (operating cost ≈ $0.10/customer/month)
• Human effort: under 15 minutes a day (key-checkpoint review only)

Architecture: a 6-agent pipeline

The core is a fixed agent pipeline that runs once a day:

1. Planner — plans the day’s scan scope and priorities
2. RegScanner — fetches the latest from each regulatory source
3. LegalInterpreter — translates statutes/notices into business language
4. RiskMapper — maps changes onto each customer’s business profile
5. AlertComposer — generates a personalized compliance briefing
6. Critic — scores quality; below threshold sends it back

This is a concrete instance of the Think → Do → Check → Improve loop: the first five agents handle Think/Do, the Critic handles Check, and the distilled rules enter memory to complete Improve.

Why the margin reaches 80%

The key is model routing. Most RegWatch tasks (fetching, classifying, tagging) sit at L1 (Haiku / Qwen-7B); only reasoning tasks like statute interpretation escalate to L3. Combined with Prompt Cache — system prompts, customer profiles and SOP docs are reused constantly — per-customer model cost is pressed to about $0.10/month. See our breakdown of smart model routing.

Three reusable takeaways

• Narrower vertical, higher automation: a fixed pipeline with fixed output formats makes Critic scoring far more stable than open-ended tasks.
• Keep humans at checkpoints, not in the whole flow: RegWatch humans review only high-risk briefings; the rest is automatic.
• Unit economics before scale: make per-customer margin positive first, then talk about 5,000 customers.

The RegWatch template is now a reference case for Enterprise Service OPC. Want to run a vertical compliance service? Contact us.

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