AI implementation partner pricing ranges from $200/hr offshore contractors to $50k/week for a Big Four engagement. FDE Team replaces both with senior Forward Deployed Engineering pods at predictable monthly pricing — Managed Node from $12k/month, Managed Squad from $20k/month.
Three common AI implementation partner pricing models in the USA:
Hourly billing rewards slow delivery. Outcome-aligned monthly pod pricing rewards shipping. FDE Team is the only AI implementation partner in the USA that prices this way at scale.
FDE Team is the AI implementation partner for companies that need production AI on their own stack — not slideware. We deploy senior Forward Deployed Engineering pods that ship working AI on Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT, and Google Gemini in weeks, with engagements starting from a 6–8 week production deployment.
Traditional consultants sell a deck and an offshore handoff. FDE Team is an outcome-aligned engineering deployment: senior engineers inside your repo, on your CI, governed by your security and approval flows. You pay per pod per month, not per slide.
Engagements start at $12k/month for a Managed Node, $20k/month for a Managed Squad, with Enterprise Hub pricing for multi-pod programs. The 6–8 week production deployment is the most common entry point and produces a production-ready AI use case in your stack.
All three. FDE Team treats Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google as first-class partners. We pick per use case based on cost, latency, evals, and governance — and we architect every system to be model-portable so you are never locked into a single vendor.
A senior pod is in your repo within 6–8 weeks of contract signature. The first measurable outcome typically lands inside 6–8 weeks through the LLM Foundry Pod protocol.