Business

The Real Cost of AI Development (And How to Budget It)

2025-12-14 · 7 min · Safecoiner Team

Four cost buckets

  • Engineering time — still the largest line item.
  • Model / API usage — predictable once you instrument it.
  • Compute & infra — vector stores, GPUs (if any), hosting.
  • Iteration — the budget teams forget; AI products improve by measuring and tuning.

Budget the iteration loop explicitly, or the project stalls after the demo.

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