01What you're actually paying for
An AI agent is not "one model with a long prompt." It is six layers, each designed, integrated, tested, and maintained for the agent to stay useful past month two. Every Hi-Ai engagement builds and operates these layers explicitly. The prices below buy you the layers — not just the base model.
- L · 01FoundationWhat it is
Base reasoning model + system prompt. Defines role, capabilities, refusal boundaries. Picked to match the task — Claude, GPT, or open-weight.
ModelSystem promptRefusals- L · 02KnowledgeWhat it knows
Internal docs + source-of-truth systems + external lookups. Chunked, indexed, retrieved with permissions intact. Citations on every answer.
RAGPermissionsCitations- L · 03GuidelinesWhat it can do
Business rules, decision logic, escalation thresholds, scope boundaries. Encoded as evaluable constraints — not vague paragraphs.
PolicyScopeEscalation- L · 04Context memoryWhat it remembers
Session state + conversation history + long-term memory. What carries across turns and days — and what is explicitly forgotten.
SessionLong-termForget rules- L · 05Brand voiceHow it speaks
Your terminology, tone, formatting, and the things you'd never say. Pre-publish review against forbidden phrases and required disclosures.
VoiceFormatDisclosures- L · 06Eval harnessHow we know it works
Reference dataset of golden questions, weekly automated runs, drift monitoring. Without this, none of the rest is maintainable.
Golden setWeekly runsDrift alerts
Agency teams are multiple agents like this coordinating with each other — for example a sales triage agent calling a knowledge agent calling a CRM-update agent — under a shared harness that monitors the whole flow. Each agent has its own L01–L06; the team adds an orchestration layer on top.
02Stage prices
- 15-min questionnaire
- 30-min discovery call
- Shadowed working session
- Written roadmap, ranked by ROI
- Source-system integration
- Permissions + observability
- Finalised MVP technical spec
- Hidden-debt surfaced early
- One agent, one workflow, scoped before contract
- Built under human-in-the-loop review
- Eval harness + baseline measurement
- First month of operations included
- Foundation + harness reused
- Second agent ~60% of first cost
- Composable system, not project
- Per-agent scope & exit
03Maintenance & Optimization
Three tiers, all month-to-month with 30 days cancellation.
Light
€1,400 / moProduction monitoring, error alerting, monthly evaluation harness re-runs, source-document refresh. Suitable for one stable agent that does not need active iteration.
Core
€2,400 / moEverything in Light, plus quarterly tuning sessions, prompt + retrieval iteration, and discovery work for the next agent. Most ongoing engagements sit here.
Plus
€4,800 / moEverything in Core, plus a half-time dedicated engineer assigned to your account, a shared Slack channel, and a 4-hour SLA on production incidents.
04Pricing policies
- Fixed scope, not time-and-materials. Once an MVP is scoped and signed, the price is the price. If we underestimated, that is on us, not you.
- Audit fee credited toward MVP. Pay €2,800 for the foundation audit. Proceed to MVP within 60 days and the full €2,800 is deducted from the MVP invoice.
- Exit after any stage. Stop after Discovery, after Audit, after MVP, after the first month of retainer. You always keep what you have paid for.
- No long contracts. Maintenance is month-to-month. Cancel with 30 days notice. We do not sell annual minimums.
- Tooling pass-through. Embedding API costs, vector DB hosting, model inference — these are billed at cost and listed line-by-line. No markup.
- Refund window. If the first MVP is not in production within the agreed timeline due to our delivery, the full MVP fee is refunded.
05What this looks like in year one
For a typical engagement — one MVP, then a Core retainer for the remaining 10 months of year one — the all-in cost lands at €36,000–€48,000 (€15–18k MVP + €2.4k × 10 months retainer + €2,800 audit, less the audit credit). Most clients see 3–5× this number in recovered hours, lift in pipeline, or reduced support cost in the same year.
For the math behind that calculation, see the field note The €40,000 question.
