No. 18Build or buy3 min readOCTYN
How much does an AI system of your own cost, and what it costs to change later.
How much a custom AI system costs comes down to two sums: the build price, and what running and changing it costs after launch. Weigh both against what the work costs your team today, in hours at your own rate. OCTYN quotes its price after a mapping call, fixed and in writing.
Search the question and most of what comes back is a range, with a low end and a high end far enough apart to be describing two different companies. That is fair enough. A page written for everyone has not seen your work. The useful answer has more than one number in it, and the first one is already sitting in your operation.
Say you run operations for a grocery chain with forty stores, and the work in question is short deliveries. A supplier sends less than the order said, the store reports it, and somebody at head office has to work out which order it was and whether the credit has been claimed yet. Each one is small. They come in every day though, from every store, and the same few people at head office end up picking all of them up.
Start with what the work costs now
The first number is what the work costs as it is done today. Say the chain logs 320 short deliveries a month, and each takes twelve minutes of finding where it was left before anyone can act on it. That is 3,840 minutes, or 64 hours a month, and those are made up figures, so put your own in. The page on what a system gives back runs the same sum on your numbers at your own hourly rate, and the post on counting admin hours goes through where to find each input.
The page then asks what share of those hours a system would carry, and leaves the share as your estimate. Whether to keep buying from a supplier that comes up short every other week is a judgement call, and the share you set should leave that with your team.
Where the build price comes from
There is no OCTYN price on the site, and this post will not give one either. The price for a build is given after a mapping call, fixed and in writing, because that call is where somebody looks at how a short delivery actually gets from a store to head office. A figure quoted before anyone has seen the work is a guess with a currency attached.
What it costs to run and to change later
The build is only the first line of total cost of ownership, and most comparisons stop there. After it come the running costs, and then the cost of changing it six months in, which is the one that rarely gets quoted. Changes fall into four buckets.
| bucket | what it means | what it costs |
|---|---|---|
| a settings change | a value already exists for it, such as a threshold or a cap | minutes, with no new code |
| a small code change | a new rule sits beside the existing ones, with a test | hours to a day |
| a large code change | something crosses a boundary, such as a new system to talk to | days to weeks, quoted before work starts |
| a rebuild | the assumption under the data changed | start again on that part |
Before signing, take the changes you are most likely to want in six months, the ones already half discussed, and ask which bucket each lands in. For the grocery chain that might be a second region coming onto the system, or a change in who signs off a credit. The page on changing a workflow six months later says that anyone who puts every change in the settings bucket is either selling or has not built it yet.
The hours are the one part of this you can have by Friday, so start there.
Bring the version of this that is about your company.
The first conversation is with the people who would build it. If there is a fit, the Consult comes next.