// pricing · build log
The $5K vs $50K AI Build: What You're Actually Paying For
AI build quotes vary by ten times for what sounds like the same product. The gap is almost never developer skill — it's scope, compliance, and how much of the hard, invisible engineering is included. Here's what each tier actually buys.
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The three real tiers
Almost every AI SaaS build lands in one of these:
$5k–$10k
Validation build
One workflow, one user type, hosted auth, a database, and payments. Enough product to charge a first customer and learn whether the workflow holds. Two to three weeks. Right when the idea is unproven.
$15k–$25k
Commercial MVP
The validation build plus real accuracy work, roles and permissions, admin tooling, usage limits and cost controls, integrations with one or two systems your buyer already uses, and monitoring. Four to six weeks. Right when you have demand and need something that survives daily use.
$35k–$50k+
Platform build
Multi-tenant architecture, audit logs, SSO, granular permissions, background job infrastructure, evaluation pipelines for model quality, SLAs, and security review. Eight to twelve weeks. Right when enterprise buyers are the customer and procurement is in the room.
What actually moves the price
Accuracy requirements. "Helpful draft a human edits" is cheap. "Correct without review" can multiply the build, because it means evaluation sets, guardrails, and fallbacks.
Integrations. Each external system — CRM, helpdesk, accounting, EHR — carries auth, rate limits, sandbox testing, and its own failure modes. Budget real days per integration, not hours.
Who the buyer is. Selling to SMBs is a product problem. Selling to enterprise adds SSO, audit trails, data residency, and a security questionnaire — that's the jump from $20k to $50k.
Volume. Ten documents a day and ten thousand are different architectures: queues, batching, caching, and per-tenant cost ceilings.
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Running costs people forget
Model usage is the obvious one, and it's usually smaller than expected — cents per task for most document and text workflows, though long-context and image work climb fast. Budget for hosting and database, error monitoring, transactional email, and one round of prompt tuning per quarter as providers update models.
The bigger hidden cost is the pricing mistake: charging a flat monthly fee for a workflow whose model cost scales with usage. Meter the expensive action from day one, even if the meter is generous.
How to avoid paying for the wrong tier
Ask for the build to be quoted as a validation build first with a written v2 list. If the workflow holds, the same codebase extends. If it doesn't, you spent $8k learning that instead of $50k.
Be suspicious of any quote that doesn't mention accuracy handling, cost controls, or what happens when the model is wrong. Those aren't extras — they're most of the real engineering.
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