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.
Most agencies get this backwards. Niche down on the selling and stay general on the building, because fulfillment is no longer what forces the choice. Here are five filters for picking a trade, what the AI adoption data says about which ones are open, and when staying a generalist is the right 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.
Payroll predicts an AI sale better than revenue does. Employer firms adopt AI at 26.1 percent against 15.3 percent for solo operators, and a small employer beats a larger nonemployer. Here is the four-point check I run before dialing, and the prospects I now skip.
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.
Three gates decide whether your outreach reaches anyone: the inbox, the phone label, and the rules you are actually under. Here are the exact thresholds Google, Microsoft and the FTC published, and the low-volume outbound that a one to ten person AI agency can run inside them.
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.
Most AI buildouts do not slip because the work is hard. They slip because nobody asked the client for an EIN in week one. Here are the six inputs a build needs, the two that sit behind review queues you do not control, and the intake email to send the day they sign.
The demo call that closes is the one where you talk least. Here is the twenty-minute sequence we use, the three questions worth planting, what to do when the agent stumbles in front of the buyer, and the cases where running a live demo is the wrong move.
Ten clients takes about a thousand first-touch emails, two hundred dials, and a demo you can hand over on the first call. Here is the real math, the objection you will actually hear, and who this does not work for.
