Procurement, huh? Welcome to the party. You're about to navigate a minefield of vendor promises and legalese. Claw-Code's sales pitch is all about "AI-powered precision," but the contract is where they try to lock you into their ecosystem and, well, *claw* back flexibility.
Here’s what you need to hammer on:
**Watch the "Data" and "Improvement" Clauses**
* **Training Data Rights:** Does your anonymized code become fuel for their model? If so, that's a hard no for most dev teams. Look for an explicit opt-out or data ownership clause that prevents this.
* **Feedback Loop:** Many contracts include a clause stating that any corrections your engineers make to their false positives/negatives become "training data" to improve the tool for *all* customers. Again, push back. Your IP shouldn't be used to improve their product for your competitors.
**The Metric Trap**
They'll promise a certain "precision/recall" rate. Get it in writing, but define the consequences.
* Is there a service level agreement (SLA) tied to it? What's the remedy if performance drops? A credit towards next year's bill is useless if your devs have already lost trust in the tool.
* How is "noise" (low-value false positives) measured and capped? If not, you're paying for a tool that makes your review queue *longer*.
**Pricing Gotchas**
* **Seat-based vs. Repo-based:** Are you paying per developer or per repository? Per-seat can explode in cost with contractor spikes. Per-repo can get messy with microservices.
* **"Enterprise" vs. "Platform":** They'll upsell you to the "platform" tier for "advanced features" that are just basic integrations (Slack, Jira). Audit what you *actually* need. Their "platform" is often just a bloated wrapper.
* **Automated Renewal & Price Increases:** Standard 3-year auto-renewal with a 5-7% annual price hike buried in the terms? Negotiate it down to 3% or require explicit consent for renewal.
The goal isn't to just buy a tool; it's to avoid buying a new problem. Your dev team will revolt if this thing spams them with irrelevant comments. Your legal team will revolt if the IP terms are loose. Your finance team will revolt at the year-two price bump.
Less is more.