AI nearshore engineers from $40/hour (€36). LLM/RAG MVPs from $15K, agentic workflows from $40K, fine-tuned domain models $60K–$200K+. Most of the cost is non-prompt: evals, guardrails, observability, data pipelines and inference budget.

Discovery + scoping at a fixed fee (1–2 weeks). Then either fixed-price for well-defined MVPs, or time-and-materials for evals/iteration phases where the scope evolves with model behavior. Dedicated AI squads (engineer + ML + data) priced per-month.

Evals and guardrails (often 30–40% of build), data preparation and labeling, retrieval infrastructure (vector DB, chunking, indexing), monitoring and drift detection, latency targets, and the inference budget at scale. Treat inference cost as ongoing OPEX, not a one-time fee.

Yes. Minimum is a 2-week paid discovery ($5K–$8K) to scope feasibility, eval criteria, data readiness and the build estimate. Build projects start at $15K. We do not take "drop in a chatbot" requests without scoping.

Inference at scale (a $50/day demo can become $5K/month in production), vector storage growth, fine-tuning iterations, evaluation harness maintenance, and the human-in-the-loop labor needed for quality. We model 12-month TCO (build + inference + ops) so you do not get surprised.

Yes. AI engineering is a senior, English-speaking discipline. Nearshore Morocco: $40–$70/hour senior. Onshore EU/US: $150–$300/hour. Same quality at 50–70% lower rate, GMT timezone overlap with EU. We staff ML engineers with prior LLM/RAG production experience.

Share your use case, target users, success metrics and any data samples. You get a written scoping proposal within 24 working hours covering the discovery week, build estimate, eval plan and inference budget model.