AI cost calculator: what does your project actually cost?
A free AI development cost calculator for a RAG assistant, an AI MVP or a data pipeline. Six questions. A real range, based on what production builds actually cost, not a number designed to get you on a sales call. It runs in your browser, and nothing is sent unless you ask for the estimate by email.
About 4 weeks
$8,000 – $11,000
A production assistant over your own documents, with citations and evals.
These are real build ranges, not a lead-capture number. If your answers put you under $6,000, the honest advice is usually that you don't need a custom build yet, and I'll tell you that on the call.
Email me this estimate
Optional. You get the range above, your six answers and the breakdown, in one plain email.
How these numbers are built
Most agency quotes price the demo and discover the rest later. These ranges price the parts that actually consume the weeks:
- Data preparation — usually 30–50% of an assistant build: scanned files, three versions of a policy, nothing marked current.
- Evaluations — a set of real questions with verified answers, run on every change. Skip this and you cannot tell whether a change helped.
- Integration — every legacy system adds a week you did not plan for.
- Handover — repos, docs and a runbook someone else can deploy from. Without it you own a dependency, not an asset.
More detail in the full cost breakdown, the RAG chatbot cost guide, and why these are fixed prices, not hourly estimates. Packages: RAG chatbot · AI MVP · data pipeline.