Pricing
What this actually costs.
Most consultancies hide the number until you have spent a call earning it. Here are real ranges, what drives them, and what the money is actually buying.
03 / What it costs
Real numbers,
before you have to ask.
"Contact us for pricing" wastes your time. Here are honest ranges from real scopes. The estimator lands within ±25% — the written quote comes after a discovery call.
Typical timeline: 2–5 weeks from kickoff to production.
- Phase 0 server hardening before anything goes live
- Least-privilege credentials and human approval gates
- Source code in your repository from day one
- 30 days of post-launch support and iteration
Estimator accuracy ±25%. Final number is fixed and written, after a free call.
Where the money actually goes
The AI is the cheap part.
Integration work, edge cases, and safe deployment are what a real engagement is made of.
Mapping the workflow, agreeing scope, writing the spec you sign off on.
The actual system — logic, agents, tools, interface, evaluation.
Every system you connect adds engineering time. Clean APIs are cheap; legacy is not.
Phase 0 server work, least-privilege access, approval gates, production rollout.
First 30 days of fixes and adjustments against real usage.
02 / Why it matters
Small repetition becomes expensive infrastructure.
A ten-minute task is not a ten-minute problem when it interrupts a team all week. Use the model to estimate how much capacity one recurring workflow quietly consumes.
That is more than half of one full-time workweek spent repeating the same workflow.
Directional estimate: 5 workdays per week. Actual savings depend on the workflow and exception rate.
06 / Straight answers
Questions worth asking.
Including the ones where the honest answer costs me the project.
Do I actually need custom software, or is ChatGPT enough?
Often ChatGPT is enough, and I will tell you so. A chat window is great for drafting and thinking. It stops being enough when the work needs your live data, has to happen without someone prompting it, or must never take a destructive action unsupervised. That is the line where a custom build starts paying for itself.
How accurate is the estimator?
Within about 25% for a well-understood scope. The variables that move it are how clean your data is, how cooperative your existing systems are, and how many exceptions the workflow really has. The written quote after a discovery call is fixed.
What is not included in a quote?
Third-party usage costs — model APIs, telephony, hosting — which get set up under your own accounts so you keep direct billing control and can leave at any time. You get a forecast of those before work starts.
What happens if we stop working together?
You keep everything. The code is in your repository, the infrastructure is in your accounts, and the build is documented well enough for another developer to continue. There is no platform to be locked into.
How do you keep an AI agent from doing something catastrophic?
Least-privilege credentials, explicit approval gates on destructive operations, and a bounded set of tools per agent. Agents prepare work; people approve the consequential parts. This is architecture, not a setting.
Can we start small?
Preferred. The best first engagement is the smallest system that proves value against a real workflow. Everything after that builds on code you already own.
Do you sell anything off the shelf?
One thing. Arctyk Vision is our own productized service for local Google Maps and AI-search visibility — $1,000 a month per location, cancel anytime. If your problem is that customers a few miles away cannot find you, that is a cheaper and faster answer than a custom build, and you should start there instead. Everything else we do is scoped to your operation.
04 / Start here
Bring us the problem before you know the product.
Tell us what keeps repeating, breaking, or consuming people who should be doing higher-value work. We'll respond with a concrete next step—not a pitch deck.
hello@arctyklabs.com
Call or text
(409) 336-1979
Start a direct chat
GitHub
github.com/mgajor
Or send a message
We'll respond within 24 hours — usually sooner.