AI & models

How we explain a price: inside the recommendation engine

Every Elastly price ships with its reasoning. Here's the model architecture that makes a black box auditable.

Marcus LindqvistStaff ML Engineer · June 5, 2026 · 6 MIN READ
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ARTICLE HERO · 16:9

A pricing recommendation no one can interrogate is a recommendation no one will approve. So we built the engine inside-out: explanation first, score second.

Each recommendation decomposes into weighted drivers — demand headroom, competitive position, cost movement, and the guardrail that clipped the final number. The weights are the model; there is no hidden layer doing the real work.

That constraint shapes everything. We favor interpretable estimators over opaque ones, and we attach the plain-language reason to the response itself, so the price and its justification can never drift apart.

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