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In brief.
What does it really cost to develop, in-house, an AI tool tasked with analysing files and preparing the company’s responses? Far more than the demonstration suggests: market analyses put a serious project at between USD 1.4 million and 2.2 million over three years, against USD 120,000 to 360,000 for a specialised solution over the same period. The gap does not come from the initial technology, which is almost free, but from everything else: people, security, evaluation, operations and opportunity cost.
The lines of an honest budget
The team: four to eight engineers for three years, in a market where these profiles are scarce and expensive; by far the largest item. Usage: either calls to external models billed by consumption, whose cost grows with the tool’s success, or dedicated compute infrastructure, with its capital expenditure and its operating burden. Security and compliance: permission partitioning, hardening against document-borne manipulation, audits. Evaluation: test sets annotated by experts, regression benches, iterations to cross the useful reliability threshold. Operations and support: monitoring, incidents, training, version upgrades.
The two costs spreadsheets forget
Time: six to twelve months before real value, during which teams work the old way and better-equipped competitors move ahead. Opportunity: what those same engineers would have produced on your product — the one your clients buy. Against that, a market solution’s subscription has one virtue: predictability. Provided you watch for it, because some usage-based pricing lets unpredictability back in through the window; the question to ask remains “does my cost depend on my volume of use?”.
The Optivalue.ai approach
Optivalue.ai is subscribed to on a flat-fee basis, with no token or credit billing: a predictable cost that finance can put on a single line, whatever the volume of files processed.
Why is the cost gap so large?
Because the vendor spreads industrialisation across all its clients; a build pays for it alone.
What is the opportunity cost, concretely?
The product features your best engineers did not ship during three years.
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