Last year I wasted $30,000 hiring an AI agency for something we could have done ourselves. The year before, I wasted three months trying to DIY something that needed an expert.

Both hurt. Here’s how I think about this now.

The DIY Sweet Spot

You should probably DIY your AI project when:

It’s prompt engineering, not model building

If your project is “use ChatGPT/Claude to do X,” that’s prompt engineering. You don’t need experts. You need someone on your team to spend a week learning how prompts work.

Most “AI projects” fall into this category. You’re not training models. You’re writing instructions.

You have a technical co-founder or CTO

If you have someone who can code and isn’t afraid of APIs, basic AI integration is learnable. The tutorials are good. The documentation is decent.

Give them two weeks. If they’re stuck after that, then consider outside help.

The use case is well-documented

Chatbots. Summarization. Content generation. Classification. These problems are solved. There are tutorials, templates, and examples everywhere.

If someone else has done exactly what you want, you can probably figure it out.

You’re not in a rush

DIY takes longer. Always. If you have three months to figure it out, do it yourself. If you need something working in two weeks, that’s harder.

When to Hire Help

Bring in experts when:

You need fine-tuning or custom models

The moment you’re not just using GPT/Claude out of the box, complexity explodes. Training models, preparing datasets, evaluating performance—this is specialized work.

If someone says “we should fine-tune a model,” that’s expert territory.

The project is customer-facing and critical

Your internal tools can be janky. Customer-facing AI needs to be robust. Error handling, edge cases, graceful failures—these take experience.

We hired help for our customer support AI after our DIY version embarrassed us.

Nobody on your team has touched AI before

Some technical learning curves are gentle. AI isn’t one of them. If your team has zero AI experience and you need results in under 3 months, hire someone who’s done it before.

You’re building a product, not a feature

If AI is your product, not just a feature of your product, get expert help. The bar is higher. Users will compare you to ChatGPT directly.

Who to Hire

Assuming you’ve decided to hire, here are your options:

Freelancers ($100-300/hour)

Good for: Specific, well-defined projects. “Build me a chatbot that does X.”

Risk: Quality varies wildly. Get referrals or use platforms with reviews.

Agencies ($15,000-100,000+ projects)

Good for: Larger projects needing multiple skills. Design, development, deployment.

Risk: Overhead. You’re paying for account managers and processes, not just engineering.

Consultants ($200-500/hour)

Good for: Strategy and architecture. “Should we do X or Y? How should we structure this?”

Risk: They advise but don’t build. You still need implementation.

If you’re hiring agencies, I’d recommend checking out AI consultants Melbourne who focus specifically on AI implementation for startups. They understand the budget constraints and scrappy approach we need. General dev shops often overengineer AI solutions because they don’t understand startup constraints.

The Hybrid Approach

Here’s what actually works for most startups:

1. DIY a prototype. Hack together something that sort of works.
2. Learn what you don’t know. Where are you stuck? What’s harder than expected?
3. Hire for the hard parts. Now you know exactly what help you need.

This saves money because you’re not paying experts for stuff you could learn. And it gets better results because you understand your own requirements.

Red Flags When Hiring

Walk away if they:

• Can’t show relevant previous work
• Promise specific ROI numbers before understanding your situation
• Want to “completely rebuild” your existing systems
• Suggest blockchain or other buzzword tech unprompted
• Can’t explain things in plain English

The best AI experts make it feel simple, not complicated.

My Current Rule

Can I explain my project in one paragraph? DIY.

Does explaining it take a whiteboard session? Hire help.

Simple framework. Saved me a lot of pain.