Cost Comparison

FRE|Nxt Labs vs Building an In-House AI Team

Get production AI results in weeks instead of months of hiring and onboarding

Side by Side

How We Compare

Cost (Year 1)

In-House

$200K-400K+ (salary, benefits, equipment)

FRE|Nxt Labs

$30K-75K (2-3 project engagements)

Time to First Result

In-House

3-6 months (hiring + onboarding)

FRE|Nxt Labs

4-6 weeks (first deliverable)

Expertise Breadth

In-House

Limited to who you hire

FRE|Nxt Labs

LangChain, LangGraph, RAG, multi-agent, 5+ frameworks

Scaling

In-House

Linear cost per head

FRE|Nxt Labs

Scale up/down per project

Risk

In-House

Full employment commitment

FRE|Nxt Labs

Project-based, no long-term lock-in

Latest Tech

In-House

Depends on team learning

FRE|Nxt Labs

Always current (it's our full-time focus)

The Numbers

The Math is Simple

A senior AI/ML engineer

$180K-250K/year salary + $30K-50K benefits & overhead

You'll likely need 2+ engineers for production AI

$400K-600K/year

Our typical engagement

$10-25K per project, production results in 4-12 weeks

The bottom line

That's 3-5 full projects for the cost of one engineer's first quarter

What You Get

Why Teams Choose Us

Production-Proven Expertise

Multi-agent systems, RAG pipelines, LLM orchestration — battle-tested in real deployments.

Speed to Market

First deliverable in 4-6 weeks. No hiring delays, no onboarding ramp.

Flexible Engagement

Scale up for sprints, scale down between projects. No long-term commitments.

Results

Proven Impact

8

Production AI agents deployed

50-70%

LLM cost reduction

5-10x

Throughput improvement

<2s

Response latency

Ready to move faster?

Skip the months of hiring and onboarding. Get production AI results in weeks with a team that's already built what you need.