hjLabs.in
verified Transparent Pricing - No Hidden Fees

AI Solutions at Transparent Pricing

No hidden fees. Clear packages. Flexible engagement models.

Choose the package that fits your business needs and goals

Pricing below covers all four of our core service lines: Agentic AI Development, RAG System Development, LLM Fine-Tuning, and MLOps & Deployment.

update Last updated 2026-05-18

How much does AI/ML consulting cost in India in 2026? A clear breakdown.

If you are scoping an AI/ML build in 2026 you have probably noticed that most consultancy quotes look like guesswork — opaque day-rates, vague "let's discuss" buttons and proposals that double after the kick-off call. This page exists so that does not happen to you. Below are the actual price ranges hjLabs.in has charged across 50+ delivered projects since 2017, broken down by package and by service line, with INR figures shown alongside the USD figures we quote to international clients. Every range is real, every range is honest, and every range is what we would put on a fixed-price statement of work after a 30-minute scoping call.

Two things drive the cost of an AI/ML consulting project in India: scope (how much you want shipped) and complexity (how hard the underlying ML problem is). A Starter package at ₹2–10 lakh typically ships a single, well-bounded service — say a customer-support RAG bot over 500 PDFs — in 4–8 weeks. A Growth package at ₹15–35 lakh ships multi-service integration with custom fine-tuning, MLOps pipeline and team enablement over 8–16 weeks. Enterprise engagements (₹50 lakh+) are 6+ month partnerships with a dedicated team — typical for multi-agent platforms, enterprise RAG over millions of documents, or fully custom MLOps infrastructure. Compared to Bay-Area or London consultancies running similar scope at $200–350K, our India-built delivery lands 55–75% cheaper without dropping the senior engineer mix you would get in those markets — that is the simple math behind why teams across the US, UK, UAE, Germany, Singapore and Australia choose us.

Choose Your Package

Flexible plans designed to match every stage of your AI journey

🚀
Starter
₹2–10L
$6K – $12K · Starter Package
  • check_circleSingle AI service
  • check_circleBasic implementation
  • check_circleModel deployment
  • check_circle3 months support
  • check_circleDocumentation
  • check_circleBest for: Small businesses, PoCs
Get Started
📈
Growth
₹15–35L
$18K – $42K · Growth Package
  • check_circleMultiple service integration
  • check_circleCustom model training
  • check_circleMLOps pipeline setup
  • check_circle6 months support
  • check_circleTeam training
  • check_circleBest for: Mid-sized companies
Get Started
starMost Popular 🏢
Enterprise
₹50L+
$60K+ · Enterprise Package
  • check_circleEnd-to-end AI transformation
  • check_circleMulti-agent systems
  • check_circleEnterprise RAG platform
  • check_circleFull MLOps infrastructure
  • check_circle12+ months partnership
  • check_circleDedicated AI team
  • check_circleBest for: Large enterprises
Get Started
🔄
Retainer
₹3.3–10L/mo
$4K – $12K · monthly retainer
  • check_circleOngoing AI optimization
  • check_circleMonthly model updates
  • check_circlePerformance monitoring
  • check_circlePriority support
  • check_circleFlexible hours
  • check_circleBest for: Continuous improvement
Get Started

Service-Specific Pricing

Detailed breakdown by service type and complexity tier

🤖 AI Agentic Systems

Discovery & Strategy

$3K - $6K

PoC Development

$10K - $18K

Production System

$30K - $120K+

📚 RAG Systems

Basic RAG

$7K - $15K

Enterprise RAG

$25K - $60K

Multimodal RAG

$36K - $84K

🎯 LLM Fine-Tuning

Prompt Engineering

$2.5K - $6K

LoRA Fine-Tuning

$10K - $18K

Full Model Training

$30K - $90K

⚙️ MLOps & Deployment

MLOps Assessment

$4K - $7K

Pipeline Implementation

$15K - $36K

Managed MLOps

$4K - $10K/mo

👁️ Computer Vision

Basic CV System

$10K - $18K

Advanced Segmentation

$18K - $42K

Real-time Video Analytics

$30K - $72K

Why Our Pricing Stands Out

Value-driven, transparent, and built for real business ROI

💎

Transparent

No hidden fees or surprise charges. What you see is what you pay.

💰

Global Quality

Enterprise-grade AI development, trusted by teams across 12 countries.

🎯

Value-Based

Pricing based on ROI and business impact, not just hours logged.

Package Comparison

Quick side-by-side view of what's included in each plan

Feature Starter Growth Enterprise
Project Duration 4-8 weeks 8-16 weeks 6+ months
Team Size 1-2 engineers 2-4 engineers Dedicated (5+)
Custom Models Pre-trained ✓ Fine-tuned ✓ Fully custom
MLOps Pipeline Basic ✓ Advanced ✓ Enterprise-grade
Support Period 3 months 6 months 12+ months
Training Documentation ✓ Team training ✓ Comprehensive
SLA Email support ✓ 48hr response ✓ 24hr priority

India vs US, UK and SE Asia — AI/ML Consulting Rates 2026

Real day-rate and project-rate benchmarks for senior ML engineers, sourced from RGF, Glassdoor and our own win/loss data across 12 countries.

Market Senior ML Engineer Day-rate Typical RAG PoC (8 wks) Production MLOps Build Notes
🇮🇳 hjLabs.in (India) ₹18,000 – ₹35,000
$220 – $420		 ₹6 – 12 lakh
$7K – $14K		 ₹15 – 30 lakh
$18K – $36K		 Senior-only team. Async, follows your timezone. 50+ projects shipped.
🇺🇸 US (SF Bay / NYC) $1,400 – $2,400 $80K – $150K $180K – $400K 5–8× our rates. Mix of seniors and juniors.
🇬🇧 UK (London) £900 – £1,500 £55K – £95K £120K – £280K 4–6× our rates. Common procurement bottlenecks.
🇩🇪 Germany / EU €800 – €1,400 €48K – €85K €110K – €240K 3.5–5.5× our rates. GDPR-ready delivery.
🇦🇪 UAE / Saudi AED 2,200 – 3,800 AED 180K – 320K AED 380K – 900K Premium GCC budgets. On-site visits required.
🇻🇳 SE Asia (VN, PH, ID) $80 – $180 $3K – $7K $10K – $22K Cheaper than India but typically junior-heavy teams.

Why we don't try to be the cheapest in SE Asia: 8 years of shipping production ML in India means we beat SE Asia on senior staff mix and beat the West on price. The result is a delivery sweet-spot you cannot get elsewhere — and the reason 12+ countries trust us. Read our India offshore AI/ML consulting guide for the full case.

How to choose your AI/ML consulting tier

A simple decision tree based on where you are right now

🧪

"We have an idea, no data yet"

Start with a 2-week Discovery & Strategy engagement (₹2.5–5 lakh). We map data sources, define success metrics, run a quick feasibility test on sample data, and deliver a written go/no-go recommendation. Most teams move into Starter or Growth from here.

Best: Discovery
🚀

"We need to prove ROI to leadership"

Pick Starter (₹2–10 lakh). Single bounded service — usually a RAG bot, LLM-powered automation or a CV inspection PoC — shipped in 4–8 weeks with a live demo and ROI numbers your CFO can sign off on. 80% of our Starter clients upgrade to Growth within 6 months.

Best: Starter
📈

"PoC done, ready to ship to production"

Growth (₹15–35 lakh) is the right next step. Custom fine-tuning, MLOps pipeline, integration with your stack (Salesforce, Snowflake, AWS), and 6 months of post-launch support. Team enablement included so your engineers own it on day 91.

Best: Growth
🏢

"We want an AI platform, not one feature"

Enterprise (₹50 lakh+) is for multi-agent platforms, enterprise-wide RAG over millions of docs, or fully-custom MLOps for regulated industries (BFSI, healthcare). Dedicated team of 5+, 12-month partnership, quarterly business reviews.

Best: Enterprise
🔄

"Models in prod, need someone watching them"

Retainer (₹3.3–10 lakh/month). Monthly model evaluation, drift detection, retraining triggers, performance reporting and priority Slack support. We act as your fractional ML team. Easy to pause or scale up.

Best: Retainer

Still not sure? Book a free 30-minute consultation and we'll tell you honestly which tier fits.

What's NOT included in our AI/ML pricing

Transparency means telling you what you'll pay separately, before we sign a SOW

warning_amberThird-party costs you pay directly

  • LLM API usage — OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini etc. billed to your account, not ours. We optimize for low spend (typical: $50–500/month for SMB RAG, $2K–8K/month for high-traffic agentic platforms).
  • Cloud infrastructure — AWS, GCP, Azure, vector DBs (Pinecone, Weaviate). We provision in your account so you keep ownership and avoid vendor lock-in.
  • Annotation services — if your project needs labelled training data (e.g. computer vision), we recommend Scale or Labelbox or in-house labellers. We project-manage but do not mark up these costs.
  • Domain-specific datasets — proprietary medical, legal or financial datasets you license from third parties.

infoItems quoted separately on request

  • 24×7 on-call SLA — Enterprise can add a 99.9% uptime SLA with on-call rotation (₹1.5–4 lakh/month).
  • On-site visits — for GCC, US and EU clients who require on-site kick-off / quarterly reviews. Travel and accommodation billed at cost; consultant days at standard rate.
  • Compliance audits & certifications — SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA documentation packs. We have shipped these for 6 clients; quoted per project.
  • Major feature additions — anything outside the original SOW is quoted at the same hourly equivalent as your active tier.
  • Third-party integrations not in scope — if you decide mid-project you also want a Slack bot, ServiceNow connector, or custom CRM sync, it's a change-order.

What clients say about our pricing

Three quotes from production engagements. Full case studies on request.

★★★★★

"We had two proposals — one from a London firm at £180K and hjLabs at ₹28 lakh for the same scope. Three months in, hjLabs had shipped to production while the other vendor was still in discovery. Easiest budget decision I've made."

VP Engineering

FinTech scale-up · London → Bengaluru

★★★★★

"Their Discovery tier at ₹4 lakh saved us from a 6-month dead-end. Within two weeks they showed us our data wasn't ready and proposed a phased fix. No upsell pressure, just honest scoping. We came back for Growth six months later."

Head of Data Science

Healthcare provider · Mumbai

★★★★★

"Milestone-based pricing is what closed the deal. 30/40/30 instead of T&M means our finance team can plan, and our engineering team knows what 'done' looks like. Two production releases later, still on the original quote."

CTO

Manufacturing SaaS · Pune

Book Your Free Consultation

Pick a time that works for you — no commitment required

Not Sure Which Package Is Right for You?

Schedule a free 30-minute consultation to discuss your AI needs and get a custom quote.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Everything you need to know before getting started

Yes! We offer milestone-based payments for projects over $12K. Typically: 30% upfront, 40% mid-project, 30% on completion.

Support includes bug fixes, performance monitoring, minor updates, and technical assistance. Major feature additions are quoted separately.

Absolutely! We recommend starting with a PoC or Discovery phase to validate the approach before committing to a full implementation.

Yes, all custom code developed for your project is yours. We provide complete source code, documentation, and deployment guides.

The tier ranges shown on this page are real ranges based on 50+ delivered projects. Every engagement starts with a free 30-minute scoping call, after which we send a fixed-price proposal with clear deliverables, milestones and payment schedule. We do not bill hourly for productised packages — you know the final number before we start work. The only time the number changes mid-project is if you ask for a change-order in writing.

Starter (₹2–10 lakh) — single AI service (e.g. one RAG bot, one CV model), model deployment, documentation, 3 months of bug-fix support. Typical timeline 4–8 weeks.

Growth (₹15–35 lakh) — multiple service integration, custom LoRA fine-tuning, MLOps pipeline, 6 months of support, team training session. Typical timeline 8–16 weeks.

Enterprise (₹50 lakh+) — end-to-end transformation, multi-agent systems, enterprise RAG, full MLOps infrastructure, dedicated 5+ person team, 12+ months partnership, quarterly business reviews.

Retainer (₹3.3–10 lakh/month) — ongoing optimization, monthly model updates, performance monitoring, priority Slack support, flexible hours.

Yes — roughly 40% of our projects start as a hybrid of two tiers. For example: a Growth-style RAG build plus a Retainer for continuous evaluation. After the scoping call we draft a custom Statement of Work with milestones, deliverables and price. We do not force you into a fixed bucket if your problem does not fit one.

For projects above ₹10 lakh we use milestone-based payments — typically 30% on kick-off, 40% at the mid-project milestone (e.g. successful PoC demo), and 30% on production handover. Retainers are billed monthly in advance. We invoice in INR for India clients and accept USD/EUR/GBP wire, Wise or Stripe for international clients. GST is added at 18% for Indian clients; international clients are zero-rated under SEZ export of services rules.

We offer a 14-day satisfaction guarantee on the Discovery & Strategy phase — if the strategy document does not meet the scope agreed in the SOW, we refund 100%. For build phases, work delivered to an accepted milestone is non-refundable, but we will rework deliverables until they meet the acceptance criteria written in the SOW. In 50+ engagements since 2017 we have issued a full refund once — and we still recommend that client to peers.

Yes. Enterprise and Retainer engagements include a dedicated team allocation — typically 1–2 ML engineers, a solutions architect and a part-time MLOps engineer. You can scale up (add a second engineer) or scale down (drop to 0.5 FTE) with 30 days written notice; pricing changes proportionally on the next billing cycle. We never lock you into a team size that no longer fits.