AI development cost calculator
Five answers, and the estimate comes from the same bands we quote against on our pricing page: $15,000–$30,000 for an LLM feature in a product you already run, $40,000–$120,000 for a full AI product, $4,000–$7,000 a month per engineer on your team. No email needed to see the number.
Estimate your AI project
Change any answer and the estimate updates. Every figure is USD and excludes third-party running costs.
How the estimate is worked out
Two steps, both on the page, so you can check the arithmetic rather than trust it.
First, the band. What you are building picks one of the bands we publish and quote against. An LLM feature or a single agent workflow added to a product that already exists is the LLM integration band, $15,000–$30,000 over 2–4 weeks. A full AI product, a custom document-processing platform or a multi-agent system is the AI product band, $40,000–$120,000 over 8–12 weeks. Engineers on your team are $4,000–$7,000 per engineer per month, with three months as the minimum.
Then, where inside it. Our pricing page names five things that move a quote inside every band. Three of them only ever push it up, and they are scored: integration count (0–2 points), data readiness (0–2) and production scale on day one (0–1). Up to 1 point puts the estimate in the lower third of the band, 2–3 in the middle third, 4–5 in the upper third. A multi-agent system goes straight to the upper third, because that is where it sits. The other two drivers have no direction — an inherited codebase can be cheaper or dearer than a rewrite, and HIPAA or SOC 2 work is quoted on top — so they appear as notes, not as dollars.
That placement rule is ours, and it is deliberately simple. A discovery call replaces it with one fixed number, in writing, within 48 hours.
The bands behind the calculator
The same figures as /pricing and the service pages they come from.
| What you are building | Band | Typical time | How it is bought |
|---|---|---|---|
| An LLM feature in an existing product | $15,000–$30,000 | 2–4 weeks | Fixed price |
| One AI agent workflow in an existing product | $15,000–$30,000 | 2–4 weeks | Fixed price |
| A full AI product or AI SaaS MVP | $40,000–$120,000 | 8–12 weeks | Fixed price |
| Custom AI document processing | $40,000–$120,000 | 8–12 weeks | Fixed price |
| A multi-agent system with evaluation tooling | Top of $40,000–$120,000 | 8–12 weeks | Fixed price |
| AI engineers on your team | $4,000–$7,000 per engineer per month | Start in 1–2 weeks | Monthly, three-month minimum |
What it costs to run
The build price and the running cost are different numbers, and a quote should never blur them.
LLM API usage, cloud hosting, external audits and licensed assets are third-party costs you would pay whoever built the product. They are passed through at cost and itemised separately. For scale: on the production platform behind our enterprise AI case study, an answer costs about $0.011 and arrives in 1.9 seconds on average — the measurement and its conditions are in how to add RAG to an existing SaaS product, and the per-task arithmetic for agents is in what AI agent development costs.
Common questions
About the estimate itself.
Turn the estimate into a fixed price
Send it and the answers come with it. A free 30-minute discovery call, then a written scope with one fixed number within 48 hours.
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