How we price AI builds
Why we publish fixed prices, how the tiers actually map to scope, and what makes an AI project cost what it costs.
Most studios hide their prices because pricing case-by-case lets them charge whatever the client will bear. We publish ours because a fixed number is a promise, and a promise is what you're actually buying.
Why fixed, not hourly
Hourly billing aligns us against you: the slower we go, the more we make. Fixed-scope, fixed-price aligns us with you: we win by shipping the agreed outcome, cleanly, fast. It also forces the scope conversation up front, where it belongs, instead of discovering halfway through that "AI feature" meant six different things to six different people.
The tiers on our services page are anchors, not quotes. They tell you the neighbourhood. The discovery call turns a neighbourhood into an address.
What actually drives the cost of an AI build
It's rarely the model. The model is a line item. The cost lives in the parts teams forget to price:
- Retrieval quality. A RAG demo takes an afternoon. RAG that's right, good chunking, real evals, latency and cost under control, is most of the work.
- Evals and observability. The difference between "it worked in the demo" and "we can tell if a change made it better" is a test suite, tracing, and dashboards. Skip it and you pay later, in production, at the worst time.
- The non-AI 80%. Auth, data model, UI, states, deployment. The AI is the exciting 20%; the product around it is the 80% that determines whether anyone can use the exciting part.
- Guardrails. Prompt injection, tool permissions, red-teaming. Cheap to build in, expensive to bolt on.
How to read the tiers
- Starter proves one thing works, a prototype, a scoped agent, a single-source RAG. Weeks, not months.
- Growth is a real product: multi-tool, evaluated, deployed, something you'd put in front of paying users.
- Premium is production-grade at scale, orchestration, monitoring, SLAs, and usually an embedded relationship rather than a one-shot build.
The regional note
We quote foreign markets in USD and Indian referrals at a regional rate. Same quality, different market. We don't undercut the public number, and we don't inflate it because you asked nicely.
If you're weighing an AI build, the fastest way to a real number is a call. We'll tell you the tier, what drives it, and where you could cut scope to hit a budget. Get in touch.
