Should I build AI integration in house or hire an agency?
Short answer
Build in house if you have engineers with spare capacity and the AI feature is central to your product, because you will be changing it for years. Hire an agency if you need a first working version quickly, your team is busy with the roadmap, or nobody on the team has shipped an AI feature to production before.
By Kailesk Khumar, founder of HouseofMVPs. Last reviewed .
The decision
| Situation | Better choice | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| AI is the core of the product | In house, possibly after an agency start | You need the knowledge inside the company |
| One AI feature on an existing product | Agency | Fixed scope, done in weeks, team stays on roadmap |
| Team has shipped AI features before | In house | No learning curve to pay for |
| Team is new to AI and under time pressure | Agency | Avoids the common first mistakes |
| Sensitive data with strict internal rules | In house, or agency inside your environment | Access is the constraint |
What in house really costs
The visible cost is engineer time. The hidden cost is what those engineers are not building. A first AI feature also carries a learning curve: evaluation, output validation, cost control and prompt changes that break things are each learned once, usually the hard way.
What an agency really costs
The fee, and the risk of depending on someone outside. Reduce that risk with three conditions: the code lives in your repository, your engineers review it, and the handover includes the evaluation set and documentation. Then the knowledge comes inside with the code.
The middle route
Have an agency build the first version with one of your engineers involved, then take it over. You get speed now and ownership later. This works well when the feature is important but the team has not done it before.
How HouseofMVPs handles this
We build AI integrations at a fixed $5,000 for one system in 1 to 2 weeks, in your repository, with the evaluation set, monitoring and documentation handed over. If you would rather build it yourselves, tell us on the call and we will say what we would watch out for.
Get a written scope and fixed priceRelated questions
Is it cheaper to build AI features in house?
Only if the engineers would otherwise be idle. Compare the agency fee with the salary cost of the weeks involved plus the value of the roadmap work that waits. For a single feature the agency is often cheaper and faster.
Can my team maintain what an agency builds?
Yes, if the handover is done properly. Ask for readable code in your repository, the evaluation set, a short document on how prompts and models are configured, and a walkthrough call.
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