7 min read
What it costs to start an AI agency
The fixed cost is $49 a month. The real number is the cash dip when your first client signs. Here is the month-one math at the cheap and expensive ends, and who should wait.
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The Lumina Sales blog
Updates, ideas, and practical notes from Lumina Sales on building and selling AI software.
Follow via RSSThe fixed cost is $49 a month. The real number is the cash dip when your first client signs. Here is the month-one math at the cheap and expensive ends, and who should wait.
A first white-label AI demo takes about ten minutes, most of it spent choosing a subdomain and uploading a logo. Here is the setup order, what to have ready beforehand, and the limits to know before you start.
Nothing gets deleted. Your published demo unpublishes, every draft stays, and usage drops to zero until you resubscribe. Here is the full answer, including the part about client builds that nobody thinks to ask on the pricing call.
Three different products get sold as an AI agency in a box: a course, a reseller license, and a wholesale fulfillment stack. Only one of them answers who builds the client's system after you close. Here is what each costs, with vendor pricing, and who should skip all of it.
A Top Tier buildout costs your agency up to $1,965 in month one and $565 a month after that. Sell it at $1,500 and the client is cash-positive on the second invoice, or the third once you count acquisition cost. Here is the full arithmetic, the sixty days where you are exposed, and the two things that break it.
Your client owns their customers' data, you own your agency account and demo captures, and Lumina holds it as the operator and never markets to it. Here is the full breakdown, what the model vendors do and do not keep, and what happens to everything if you cancel or a client leaves.
Hiring a developer looks like the serious choice and is usually the expensive way to learn what you should have built. Here is the arithmetic, using published developer wages and the telephony and model prices that arrive either way.
A complete buildout costs your agency $500 a month wholesale. Sell it at $1,500 and you keep $1,000 on every client. Here is the full margin math at each tier, what quietly eats it, and the kind of client the numbers never work on.
An affiliate deal pays you a percentage of a price someone else set. A white-label deal lets you set the price and own the account. Here is what 40% recurring actually buys, what the voice platforms really charge, and the margin math on one client over a year.
A build fee rarely dies because the number is too big. It dies because it moves your deal from the money an owner spends alone into the money almost nobody is spending right now. Here is the budget math behind that, what year one looks like either way, what monthly-only pricing actually costs you, and the work that should still carry a setup charge.
A demo node is one working piece of the system you sell, running live on a page your prospect opens in their own browser. Here are the six nodes, what each one proves on a call, how to sequence them, and where the demo site falls down.
A published Lumina Sales demo carries your logo, your colors, your subdomain and your booking link. It also carries one line saying the AI is a demo and its bookings are simulated. Here is what that means in front of a real prospect, and the three places the white label has a seam.
