What to ask before you pay anyone, me included, to build you AI

A lot of people are selling AI right now, and most owners I meet have no way to tell the real ones from the chancers. You are not technical, the pitch sounds impressive, and the invoice is large. So you sign, and six weeks later you have a slow chatbot nobody uses and a monthly bill you do not understand.

I want to hand you the questions that protect you. These work on any developer, any agency, and on me too. If I ever dodge one of these, walk away.

Make them show you something working in a week

The single best filter is small and boring. Ask them to show you one real thing, working, on your actual problem, within a week or two. Not a slide deck. Not a "discovery phase" that bills for a month before anything exists. A rough, ugly, working version that does one useful job.

Real AI work moves fast at the start now, because the hard parts are off-the-shelf. If someone needs three months and a big advance before you see anything function, they are either learning on your money or hiding that they cannot do it. A working scrappy demo in week one is the clearest signal of competence you will get.

Make them explain it in plain language

Ask them to explain what they are building like you are a smart twelve-year-old. If the answer is a wall of jargon, that is not you being slow. That is them either not understanding it themselves, or deliberately keeping you confused so you cannot question the price.

The people who actually know their craft can always make it simple. "It reads your incoming messages, picks the three that look urgent, and drafts a reply you approve before it sends." That is a good answer. "We leverage a multi-agent RAG orchestration layer" is a warning, unless they immediately translate it.

Ask who owns it, and where it lives

This is the trap that hurts most. Ask three flat questions. Who owns the accounts, the code, and the data? Is it all under your logins and your billing, or theirs? If you stopped working with them tomorrow, does the whole thing keep running, or does it die with them?

You want the answer to be that everything sits in your name. Your OpenAI or Anthropic account, your Make or n8n workspace, your Google or WhatsApp logins, billed to your card. A builder who quietly sets the whole thing up inside their own accounts, where you have no access, has made you a hostage. A managed sub-account or a shared workspace can be fine, as long as you can get to your own keys, data, and logins on the day you ask. The test is simple: if they walked away tomorrow, could you keep it running. If the honest answer is no, you do not want it.

Ask what it costs to run, every month, forever

A build has two prices, and most owners only hear the first one. There is the one-time fee to build it, and then there is the running cost: the AI usage, the automation tool, the hosting. Ask for that monthly number in writing before you start.

Honest tools are cheap to run. An automation platform like Make or n8n is a few thousand rupees a month at small scale. The AI model usage for a normal service business is often less than a nice dinner. If someone cannot tell you the running cost, or it is suspiciously round and large, they have not thought it through or they are padding it.

Ask what happens if you vanish

Say it to their face. "If you disappear or get too busy, what am I left with?" The good answer is a short handover document, accounts in your name, and a tool simple enough that the next person can pick it up. The bad answer is a shrug, or a custom system only they understand.

Tie payment to this. Pay in stages against working milestones, never one big advance for a promise. You should always be only one payment exposed, not the whole project.

The honest bit, at my own expense

Here is the part that might cost me work. For a lot of small AI jobs, you may not need me or any agency at all. The tools are genuinely usable now. Make, n8n, and Zapier let you wire this together by dragging boxes. There are people on YouTube walking through exactly the build you want, for free. If you have a curious person on your team and a few weekends, try it yourself first. You will understand your own business better for it.

What I sell is not the secret. The secret is all above. What I sell is the implementation done properly, owned by you, priced honestly, and run so it keeps working after launch, for the owners who would simply rather have it handled. That is the only thing worth paying for, and the questions on this page are how you check that you are getting it. From me, or from anyone.

• Puro