A standard Ryz AI pod of seven senior engineers, including a tech lead, costs about $75,000 to $105,000 a month: six senior engineers at $10,000 to $15,000 each, plus a tech lead quoted per team from $15,000. A four-person starter pod runs about $45,000 to $60,000 a month and a ten-person pod about $96,000 to $135,000, so the real answer is team size times rate, and this page shows every step of the math.
Ryz publishes its rates per engineer per month. Every figure on this page is built only from these numbers, so you can redo the arithmetic for any team shape you have in mind.
An AI pod is a dedicated team of engineers that builds AI systems in your cloud and repos and ships them to production. Our pods are usually around seven senior engineers, including a tech lead, an ML engineer and backend engineers, working as one team on US business hours. You get a scoped plan, a price and the names of the people who would do the work before anything starts. For per-role benchmarks, see AI engineer rates and machine learning engineer rates.
These are arithmetic examples, not quotes. Real quotes are scoped per team, and the mix of roles is set by the system you want built, not by a template.
Six-month totals are the monthly range times six. A full year of the standard pod is $900,000 to $1,260,000 before any lead premium. None of these figures include cloud or model usage, which run in your own accounts under your own provider agreements (more on that below).
To model your own team shape, use the AI development cost calculator. For budgets by project type rather than by team, see how much AI development costs.
The comparison that matters is total cost per month of a working team, not salary. Two public sources give a floor and a market view.
Read these with care. The BLS median covers all software developers, not AI specialists, and the 70 percent ratio is an average across all private industry workers, so the loaded figure is an approximation. Levels.fyi skews toward large technology companies where stock is a big part of pay. Neither includes recruiting fees, interview hours your senior engineers spend, or the months a seat sits empty while you hire, which is often the largest cost of all because the AI project waits. The talent cost calculator lets you plug in your own salary bands.
In-house is the right answer when the system is core to the business for years and you can hire the people. Many clients do both: a pod gets the first system into production, and their own engineers take it over.
Few providers publish pod prices. Two that describe their pricing publicly, with very different models:
Wizeline's Agentic Pods page (checked October 2026) compares a traditional pod of 10 FTEs at $120,000 a month, billed on hours, with an agentic pod of 6 FTEs plus agents at $86,400 a month at month 12, billed on outcomes, and states $403,200 in annual savings on a 10-person pod. That works out to $12,000 per person per month for the traditional pod. For comparison, the ten-person Ryz example above is $96,000 to $135,000 a month. Wizeline's figures are its own illustration; read its page for the assumptions.
Globant sells AI Pods as a subscription. At launch it said clients subscribe monthly and each subscription includes token-based metered capacity (Globant announcement). Its Glob.AI pricing page lists the billing unit for Software Pods as per supervised token, per pod, for approved output, but shows no dollar price as of October 2026, so a direct monthly comparison isn't possible. See Ryz vs Globant for how the models differ.
Per-engineer pricing buys named people who join your repos, standups and CI and report to your leads; you control the backlog. Outcome or token pricing buys a metered service where the provider runs more of the process. Neither is better in the abstract. If you want your own team to own the system later, named engineers working on your team usually make the handover simpler. For a wider view, see the best AI pod providers and AI pod vs AI agency.
What the money has shipped: fraud detection for a global fleet company (244K+ invoices scored, under 30 seconds per invoice, $5.94M in confirmed fraud) and a driver-support agent covering about 218,000 calls a year in three languages. Every engineer passes a vetting process that only the top 1% of candidates pass, and teams usually start in under two weeks once you say go.
At Ryz rates, a seven-person all-senior pod with a tech lead is about $75,000 to $105,000 a month: six senior engineers at $10,000 to $15,000 each plus a lead quoted from $15,000. A four-person pod is about $45,000 to $60,000 and a ten-person pod about $96,000 to $135,000.
Our pods are usually around seven senior engineers, including a tech lead, an ML engineer and backend engineers. Pods can start at three or four people and grow as the work grows.
Monthly figures are in the same range or lower: seven in-house engineers at the BLS median software developer wage, loaded with benefits, come to about $113,300 a month, and seven at the Levels.fyi ML/AI median come to about $145,800 before benefits. The bigger difference is time, because a pod can start in under two weeks once you say go while hiring takes months.
No. Model tokens and cloud infrastructure run in your own accounts and are billed by your providers. Use the LLM cost calculator to estimate model spend.
Wizeline publishes a 10-person traditional pod at $120,000 a month and an agentic pod at $86,400 a month at month 12. Globant sells AI Pods as monthly subscriptions with token-based metered capacity and does not publish a dollar price.
Questions we didn't answer? Email info@ryzlabs.com.
Thanks — your message has been sent. We’ll get back to you soon.
Something went wrong while sending your message. Please try again or email info@ryzlabs.com.