What does a custom AI project cost?

Custom AI proposals in this industry are usually T&M estimates dressed up as fixed bids: a range, a set of assumptions, and a clause that lets the number move. Mindfulware sells the opposite. Each sprint above has one price, one scope, one deliverable, and one calendar window. You approve the number before the work starts and it does not move.

The reason the prices can stay fixed is that the sprints are scoped to what a small senior team can actually finish in the stated window. Discovery produces an architecture and roadmap. A Prototype Sprint produces a working prototype against your real data. A Working Session produces a concrete next step in a day. None of those deliverables require a mystery amount of work, so none of them require a mystery price.

A full custom build is a much larger commitment than a sprint, and quoting one before we have seen your data, your integrations, and your evaluation set is guesswork. That is why the standard path into a build runs through the 2-Week Discovery Sprint. By the end of Discovery you have a scoped solution architecture and a roadmap, and the build proposal is written against that document rather than against a discovery deck we produced from a sales call.

For firms that already know exactly what they want to build, the 4-Week Prototype Sprint doubles as its own scoping instrument: the prototype is real code against your real data, and the follow-on build is scoped from what the prototype revealed.

AI systems drift. Data changes, prompts age, model providers roll versions, and a system that hit its accuracy bar in month one can quietly slip in month six. Post-launch AI Drift Reviews are the maintenance mechanism for that: a bounded, hourly engagement at $225 per hour with a two-hour minimum, so you can order a check-up without opening a new statement of work.

The pricing model is the same shape at every stage: a defined deliverable, a defined price, and no surprises. If a size of engagement you need is not on this list, the honest answer is that we will scope it out of a Discovery Sprint before we quote it.