Pricing
AI removed a large share of the hours. Most agencies kept the price and quietly took the margin. Here is the arithmetic they would rather you didn’t do.
Software got cheaper to produce in the last two years. Meaningfully cheaper — the repetitive volume of the work, the part that used to consume most of the hours, is now largely machine work.
Your agency quote did not get cheaper. Ask yourself why.
The uncomfortable structure of an agency
A traditional agency sells hours. Not officially — officially it sells outcomes — but the price is built from a team, a duration and a rate. That is the machine, and every incentive inside it points the same way: more hours is more revenue.
Now hand that business a technology whose entire value is that it removes hours.
AI does not threaten an hours-based agency’s quality. It threatens its margin model. Those are very different problems, and only one of them gets talked about publicly.
The rational move, if you own that business, is to adopt the tools quietly, keep the quote where it was, and let the saving fall to the bottom line. Most have. It is not even dishonest, exactly. Nobody promised you the discount.
But you should know it is happening, because you are paying for it.
What actually got cheaper (and what didn’t)
Be precise about this, because the vague version — “AI makes everything faster” — is how people get sold nonsense.
Genuinely cheaper:
- Scaffolding and boilerplate — the first 60% of any codebase that is basically the same as every other codebase
- Test writing, once a human has decided what the test should assert
- Documentation, migrations, glue code, data transformation
- The first draft of almost anything
Not cheaper at all:
- Deciding what to build, which is where most projects actually fail
- System design — the choices you cannot walk back later
- Knowing when the machine is confidently wrong
- Integration with your messy real-world systems, which no model has ever seen
- Accountability. Nobody has automated being responsible for the outcome.
So the honest arithmetic is not “AI does software now.” It is: the volume is cheap, and the judgment is not. A shop that prices as though everything got cheap is lying to you. A shop that prices as though nothing did is lying to you differently.
The three prices in the market right now
The unchanged agency quote. $15,000–$25,000 for a business site. Same as 2022, with a chatbot on the homepage and a slide about AI in the pitch deck. The tools changed; the invoice didn’t.
The bargain-bin AI shop. $600, delivered in a weekend, generated end-to-end with nobody reading it. It works right up until it doesn’t, at which point nobody is there. This is where all those swallowed errors and hallucinated APIs end up living — in your production system, unread.
And then the narrow, correct answer: pass the saving on where the saving is real, keep the human where the human is load-bearing, and charge accordingly. That lands well below a traditional agency and well above the bargain bin — because the judgment is still being paid for, and the judgment is the product.
How to interrogate anyone quoting you
Three questions. They are unfriendly, and you should ask them anyway.
- “Where in this build are you using AI, and who reads that output?” Anyone who says they don’t use it is either lying or slow. Anyone who can’t name the reviewer is selling you the bargain bin.
- “What are the assumptions behind this number, and what happens if one breaks?” A real estimate has assumptions attached. A quote with no stated assumptions is not a fixed price; it is an opening position.
- “What is the cheapest version of this that would actually solve my problem?” Watch what happens. A firm that wants to sell you hours will struggle to answer. A firm that wants to solve your problem will have an answer ready — sometimes an uncomfortably cheap one.
Our position, stated plainly
We publish our prices, and we publish a real anonymised estimate showing how a number gets built, because the fear you actually have is not that the work will be bad. It is that the number will move.
We are cheaper than a traditional agency because agents do work that used to be billed as six people’s time — and because our engineering team is in India while you deal with someone in your own timezone. That is the entire mechanism. There is no third secret.
We passed it on instead of pocketing it. That is a choice, not a magic trick, and you are entitled to ask any firm why they made the other one.
We build software this way for a living. Fixed scope, fixed price, working demos every week — and an engineer who owns every line an agent wrote.
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