{"id":39,"date":"2025-12-10T10:15:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T10:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/numriq.com\/hidden-cost-ai-poc\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T10:15:00","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T10:15:00","slug":"hidden-cost-ai-poc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/numriq.com\/en\/hidden-cost-ai-poc\/","title":{"rendered":"The hidden cost of your AI POC: 5 expenses no one calculates"},"content":{"rendered":"

A client calls after a successful POC. “How much does it cost to go to production?” The POC cost $5,000 in consulting and $200 in tokens. Our production estimate: $60,000 the first year.<\/p>\n

“How?” Here are the five lines that are never in the initial quote.<\/p>\n

1. Real token cost in production<\/h2>\n

During the POC, you process 100 documents. In production, you process 10,000 a month. With Claude Sonnet at around $3 per million input tokens, an average 5,000-token workflow \u00d7 10,000 documents = $150\/month. With Opus, multiply by 5. Not catastrophic, but to anticipate.<\/p>\n

2. Observability and logging<\/h2>\n

In production, you need to know what’s happening. How many calls, which prompts, which failures, what cost per client. Helicone, LangSmith, or a homegrown system: count $100 to $500\/month depending on volume. Without it, you’re flying blind.<\/p>\n

3. Prompt maintenance<\/h2>\n

Prompts that work in November break in March. New document types, model drift, edge cases that appear. Count 2 to 4 hours of work per month to adjust, so $400 to $800.<\/p>\n

4. Ongoing compliance<\/h2>\n

Privacy law, quarterly audits, policy updates, new employee training. Not glamorous, but unavoidable. Plan for 1 consultant day per quarter, so $4,000 to $6,000 per year.<\/p>\n

5. Team training and support<\/h2>\n

Teams using the tool need to learn to debug, know when to ignore the AI suggestion, how to escalate. Initial training + 4 follow-up sessions: $8,000 to $12,000.<\/p>\n

The realistic total<\/h2>\n

Tokens: $2,000\/year. Observability: $4,000\/year. Maintenance: $6,000\/year. Compliance: $5,000\/year. Training: $10,000\/year. Plus a 20% margin for the unexpected: you’re at around $32,000 for year one, and that’s only if everything goes well. Double it if the project is complex.<\/p>\n

The POC is an investment. Production is a recurring expense. Budget both from the start, or get ready to explain the surprise to management next quarter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A $5,000 POC can easily cost $60,000 a year in production. Here are the five expense lines that initial budgets systematically forget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-strategie"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/numriq.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/numriq.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/numriq.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/numriq.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/numriq.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/numriq.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/numriq.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/numriq.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/numriq.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}