💷 Pricing Breakdown — UK Market Rates 2025
R&D Tax Credits: Most qualifying software projects can claim up to 27% of development spend back via HMRC R&D Tax Credits. A £50,000 project could effectively cost £36,500 after relief. ClickMasters documents qualifying activities as standard. See /rd-tax-credits-software-development/
| Service / Scope | What's Included | Timeline | Starting Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Chatbot (LLM API integration) | GPT-4/Claude API, RAG architecture, knowledge base | 3–8 wks | £15,000–£40,000 |
| RAG Application | Retrieval-Augmented Generation, vector database, document processing | 4–10 wks | £20,000–£60,000 |
| Predictive Analytics Feature | ML model trained on your data, integrated into existing app | 6–14 wks | £25,000–£80,000 |
| Custom ML Model (full pipeline) | Data processing, model training, evaluation, deployment | 8–24 wks | £40,000–£150,000 |
| AI/ML Platform (production) | MLOps pipeline, model versioning, monitoring, A/B testing | 12–32 wks | £60,000–£200,000 |
| Computer Vision System | Image/video analysis, custom model or fine-tuned foundation model | 8–20 wks | £35,000–£120,000 |
What Drives Cost — Key Variables
API vs custom model: LLM API integration (GPT-4, Claude): lower build cost, per-token API fees ongoing. Custom model: higher build cost, lower inference cost at scale. Breakeven typically at 1M+ requests/month.
Data availability and quality: Clean, labelled training data is the biggest cost driver for custom ML. If you have good data: weeks of model work. If data needs cleaning/labelling: months.
UK GDPR Article 22 compliance: AI making automated decisions about individuals requires Article 22 assessment. Explainability requirements and right to human review may add significant architecture complexity.
ICO AI compliance requirements: ICO AI guidance (2023) requires: transparency about AI use, accuracy assessments, bias testing, and DPIAs for AI processing special category data. Compliance adds 15–25% to project cost.