Pricing, said without a vanity range
What custom AI development actually costs in India
A focused RAG assistant on a clean corpus is a different job from a vision pipeline. Here is how CycloneWebz prices AI work from Gurugram — and what changes the number.
Updated 2026-09-19 · CycloneWebz, Gurugram
There is no honest single price
Buyers search “AI development cost India” because agencies quote ₹50,000 and ₹50 lakh for work that looks the same on a slide. The slide is the problem. A retrieval assistant on a help centre you already have is weeks of product work. A model that must be trained on labelled images, then watched in production, is a different company of work.
At CycloneWebz in Gurugram we price after we see three things: the data you already have, the channel (website, app, WhatsApp), and the fallback when the model is wrong. Until those are clear, any number is theatre.
The bands we actually start from
A first release — one assistant, one corpus, one channel, written scope — usually lands in the ₹2L–₹8L conversation when the documents exist and the product around them is already live. Under ₹2L is possible for a tightly bounded prototype with a human fallback, not for “ChatGPT for our company.”
₹8L–₹20L is the band when the assistant must sit inside a custom website or mobile app we also ship, or when evaluation, roles, and audit logs are part of going live. ₹20L+ is when you need a dedicated team across AI, web, and QA for more than one release.
Discovery is charged when the problem still needs mapping. We will say so before anyone opens an editor. Production AI waits on data you actually have — not a promise that marketing will write the corpus later.
What moves the number up or down
Clean, owned documents with a person who can approve answers make retrieval cheaper. Messy PDFs, three CRMs, and no owner make it slower — and more expensive — because evaluation becomes the product.
WhatsApp adds policy, session design, and a different failure mode than a website widget. Vision and prediction add labelling and a monitoring loop. Fine-tuning is rarely the first release; retrieval plus a hosted model is usually faster and safer.
Questions this guide usually raises
Can you quote AI development on a phone call?
We can give a band. A scoped estimate needs the corpus, the channel, and what “done” means. Send a brief to hello@cyclonewebz.com or use the contact form.
Is Indian AI development cheaper because quality is lower?
No. You are paying for Gurugram engineers who ship the product around the model — web, app, QA — not a cheaper model API. The API is the same everywhere.
More guides
-
How to hire an AI development company in India without buying a demo
Most “AI agencies” show a chatbot that dies after the pitch. Here is how to tell a studio that ships RAG, NLP, and product work from one that rents an API.
-
RAG vs fine-tuning: what we ship first from Gurugram
Retrieval-augmented generation answers from your documents. Fine-tuning changes the model. Most Indian products need the first. Here is how we choose.
-
WhatsApp chatbot vs website assistant — which to build first
Indian buyers live in WhatsApp. Websites still convert. Here is how CycloneWebz chooses the first channel for a custom chatbot — and what changes in the build.