AI consulting, by the hour, from the people who build it
Sometimes the useful purchase is not a build but a few hours with someone who has shipped one: whether your data can carry the product, retrieval or fine-tuning, which model behind which interface, what one answer will cost at your volume, or whether the quote on your desk is honest. Our AI consulting is billed by the hour, with no minimum, by the engineers behind the systems on this site.
$100 an hour, no minimum · a free 30-minute discovery call first · an NDA before anything is shared
What an hour of AI consulting is good for
Six questions that decide how much an AI project costs and whether it works — each one cheaper to answer before the build than during it.
Can your data carry it?
A look at a genuine random sample of your documents — not the tidy examples — and an honest read on whether the answer is in them.
Retrieval or fine-tuning?
The one question that tells you which problem you actually have, and what each answer costs to run. The test we use.
What will one answer cost?
A cost-per-answer model at your volume, from your own model prices, before anything is built. The calculator behind it.
How will you know it works?
The evaluation set: which real cases, which known answers, which threshold sends an item to a person. The part a demo never needs and production always does.
Is the architecture sound?
A review of a design or a system you already run: where the model sits behind an interface, what leaves your boundary, what breaks first under load.
Is this quote honest?
A second opinion on a proposal from anyone, us included. Six questions to ask any AI vendor.
Consulting, a build or engineers?
Three things you can buy from us for an AI problem, and the one question that picks between them.
| AI consulting | A fixed-price build | AI engineers on your team | |
|---|---|---|---|
| You buy | Answers to specific questions | A working result, against a written scope | Capacity, on your backlog |
| Price | $100 an hour, no minimum | $15,000–$30,000 for a feature; $40,000–$120,000 for a product | $4,000–$7,000 per engineer per month, three-month minimum |
| Right when | You do not yet know whether or how to build | The result can be written down | You have a product owner and the gap is people |
How the last two compare in general, outside AI, is in staff augmentation vs managed services.
Who you are paying for
The engineers who design and build the systems this site publishes figures for.
The retrieval pipeline, the evaluation harness and the review workspace behind our enterprise AI case study — 87% less manual processing at 99.2% extraction accuracy across 14 data sources and 5 languages, in production in 10 weeks, about $0.011 per answer — were built by the same people you would be talking to. So were ArendaOS, our own multi-tenant SaaS, and the multiplayer backends behind 52,000 peak concurrent players. Advice from people who carry the consequences of their own architecture decisions in production tends to be more careful than advice from people who do not.
Common questions
What people ask before they book the first hour.
Have an AI question worth an hour?
Tell us the question and what depends on the answer. The first 30-minute call is free; after that it is $100 an hour, with no minimum.
Message received
We’ll review your enquiry and respond within one business day.