«InsightsPricing & practice
What does an AI integration cost in Switzerland?
The honest answer to 'what does AI cost?' is a range, not a fixed price, because AI integration can mean anything from a chatbot to an autonomous agent. Here are realistic benchmarks for the Swiss market and the factors that drive the price, so you can judge what you are paying for.
Why there is no list price
The most honest answer to the price question is a range, not a fixed number, because AI integration means very different things. A chatbot over a handful of FAQs is not the same as a RAG assistant over thousands of internal documents, or an autonomous agent that researches and acts on its own.
Anyone who quotes a fixed price without asking questions is either selling a standard product or guessing. A widespread misconception, too, is equating AI cost with the licence or usage cost of a model. The model is almost never the expensive part.
Reliable benchmarks still exist, along with the factors that move the price up or down. That is exactly what follows.
The price ranges at a glance
For orientation, rounded and as from-values: an AI or GEO audit runs around CHF 2,900 to 3,500. A focused module, such as an automation or a RAG assistant on your documents, CHF 3,500 to 4,500. An autonomous agent with guardrails and monitoring, around CHF 7,500.
Larger builds start at roughly CHF 22,000 for a web app and CHF 35,000 for a SaaS MVP. Ongoing support as a retainer, such as fractional CTO or operations, starts at CHF 1,200 to 2,900 per month.
These are starting points, not final prices. Everything scales up with scope, data volume and integration depth; scaling down means a tight, clearly scoped first step.
Where the money actually goes
Look at AI projects across many cases and a surprisingly stable pattern appears: the model itself often accounts for only 30 to 40 percent of the bill. The lion's share sits in data, integration and operations, precisely the parts no demo shows.
Data preparation is usually the single largest item: depending on the project, 20 to 45 percent of the effort. Clean, accessible, well-structured data makes a project cheap; scattered, unmaintained or legally sensitive data makes it expensive, because half the work is in the cleanup.
Almost as underestimated is integration: the invisible layer of connectors, interfaces and data reshaping that ties the AI into your actual systems, permissions and processes. Exactly where the AI adds value day to day is where the real work sits, not in the prototype that runs in isolation.
One-off and ongoing: the costs that stay
It pays to separate two kinds of cost: the one-off cost of concept, build and integration, and the ongoing cost of operation, that is hosting, monitoring, maintenance and, depending on the solution, the use of the models themselves.
The ongoing model and API costs have a peculiarity: they usually follow a price per request or per token. Unlike classic software, the cost therefore rises with usage. The cost per request has fallen dramatically in recent years, by orders of magnitude, but when you succeed, usage grows, and with it the bill.
We factor these ongoing costs in from the start and choose an architecture that keeps them proportionate to the value. And we build in data protection, integration and operation from the beginning, because a prototype that skips those parts costs double later in production, often somewhere else and under time pressure.
How we keep it transparent, and what it means for your budget
We show from-prices openly on the pricing page instead of hiding them, and work fixed-price where the scope is clear: you pay the package, not the hourly meter. That shifts the estimation risk to us, where it belongs. As the operator of our own AI SaaS, Gardeo, we know from daily experience what running in production actually costs, not just the first prototype.
For your budget, that leads to a clear recommendation: don't plan AI as a single big leap, but in stages. A small audit or module to learn and build confidence, then targeted expansion of what works. That way you pay for impact rather than slides and keep control.
The full pricing ladder, from the free check through audits and modules to a retainer, is on our pricing page, with from-prices per service. The best first step is almost always a small one.
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