Honest cost breakdown for building a ai tool — from a minimal MVP to a full-featured platform. No agency fluff, just real numbers.
MVP cost
$3,460
Full platform
up to $30,000
MVP timeline
2–4 weeks
Our delivery
21 days
Typical agency rates. Freelancers may be cheaper upfront but rarely stay within budget.
| Feature | Low | High |
|---|---|---|
| LLM API integration + streaming | $600 | $3,000 |
| RAG / vector search | $800 | $4,000 |
| Usage tracking + limits | $400 | $2,000 |
| Stripe billing (usage or sub) | $500 | $2,500 |
| Conversation history | $300 | $1,500 |
| Prompt management | $200 | $1,000 |
| Document upload + parsing | $400 | $2,000 |
| Total range | $3,200 | $16,000 |
Our fixed-price MVP bundles all core features for $3,460 — no hourly surprises.
| Option | Cost | Timeline | Risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agency (fixed price)← Us | $3,460 – $30,000 | 3–8 weeks | Low |
| Freelancer (hourly) | $4,152 – $45,000 | 2–6 months | High |
| No-code (Bubble / Webflow) | $1,384 – $4,152 | 2–6 weeks | Medium (lock-in) |
| In-house team | $150,000+/year | 6–18 months | Very high |
Next.js + Server Actions
Full-stack with streaming SSE
OpenAI / Anthropic SDK
LLM API integration
Supabase + pgvector
Database and vector embeddings
Stripe Billing
Usage-based or subscription billing
Book a free 30-min call. We'll scope your MVP and give you an exact price before you commit to anything.
A simple AI SaaS (specific use case, OpenAI API, subscription billing) costs $8,000–$20,000. Apps with custom RAG pipelines, fine-tuned models, and complex document parsing cost $25,000–$60,000.
GPT-4o is the default for most apps — best balance of speed, quality, and cost. Claude 3 is better for long documents and complex reasoning. Gemini 1.5 Pro has the largest context window (2M tokens). We pick the right model per use case.
RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) lets the AI answer questions about your own documents or data. If your app needs to reference specific content, knowledge bases, or customer data, you need RAG. We implement it with pgvector on Supabase.