We are an Indian agency and we price like one — openly. Senior engineers paid above the Indian services-industry median (that is how we keep them), charged to you as salary plus a flat 20% you can see on every invoice: engineers from $1,300 ≈ €1,100 / £1,000 / A$1,900/month, QA from $600/month, solution architects from $1,700/month fractional. Timezone overlap for the US, Canada, UK, EU, and Australia. The first 80% of an AI product is easy; we exist for the last 20% — evals, hardening, cost telemetry, reliability — that makes it production-grade.
20%
Our entire overhead, itemized
$1,300/mo
Full-time frontend engineer
The last 20%
What you are actually buying
Cheap outsourcing and AI-assisted coding both get you a working demo fast. Production is the other story: evaluation gates, failure handling, cost telemetry, security, reliability. That last 20% is where we specialize — it is why our benchmarks publish the failures too.
Vetted marketplaces quote $55-200/hour and keep the split between engineer and platform opaque — reviews estimate 40-60% of every invoice never reaches the engineer. We publish the salary bands and the 20%. You can audit every line.
A senior AI engineer hire runs 3-6 months from req to first commit, plus recruiter fees and equity. A dedicated team plan puts a senior engineer in your standup within two weeks, cancelable monthly, with a swap guarantee and a bench behind every seat.
Build your team
Full-time — dedicated, 40 hrs/wk
QA / Test Engineer
$600/mo
Frontend Engineer
$1,300/mo
Backend + AI Engineer
$1,900/mo
DevOps Engineer
$1,900/mo
AI Research Engineer
$2,500/mo
Solution Architect
$3,100/mo
Fractional — 20 hrs/wk
Fractional DevOps Engineer
$1,000/mo· overage $12/hr
Fractional AI Research Engineer
$1,400/mo· overage $16/hr
Fractional Solution Architect
$1,700/mo· overage $19/hr
Your team, monthly
$1,900 ≈ €1,700 / £1,400 / A$2,700
| 1 × Backend + AI Engineer | ₹1,50,000 (≈ $1,574) |
| Engineer salaries | ₹1,50,000 (≈ $1,574) |
| NavyaAI overhead (20%) | $326 |
| Monthly total (invoiced in USD) | $1,900 |
These are the actual salary bands we pay — above the Indian services-industry median, which is how we hire and keep senior people. The 20% is our entire margin. Typical staff-augmentation platforms bury a 40–60% markup inside the rate.
Fractional roles include 20 hours/week. Hours beyond the allotment are pre-approved by you and billed at the role's hourly rate shown above — never silently.
Estimate — final quote confirmed on the call. Cancel monthly.
Audit Focus
The first pass is designed to identify the smallest useful intervention: routing, caching, prompt control, serving tuning, or a deeper break-even audit.
List price = engineer salary (above the Indian services-industry median) plus a flat 20% overhead, rounded to the nearest $100. EUR/GBP/AUD are approximations; invoicing is in USD. The rupee salary behind each price is shown in the calculator breakdown.
| Role | What's included | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| QA / Test Engineer | Full-time, dedicated: test plans, automation, regression suites, release gates | $600 ≈ €500 / £400 / A$900 |
| Frontend Engineer | Full-time, dedicated: product UI, design systems, performance | $1,300 ≈ €1,100 / £1,000 / A$1,900 |
| Backend + AI Engineer | Full-time, dedicated: APIs, data pipelines, LLM/RAG integration | $1,900 ≈ €1,700 / £1,400 / A$2,700 |
| DevOps Engineer | Full-time, dedicated: CI/CD, infra-as-code, observability, cloud cost hygiene | $1,900 ≈ €1,700 / £1,400 / A$2,700 |
| AI Research Engineer | Full-time, dedicated: model evaluation, fine-tuning, serving optimization, agents | $2,500 ≈ €2,200 / £1,900 / A$3,600 |
| Solution Architect | Full-time, dedicated: system design, architecture reviews, technical leadership | $3,100 ≈ €2,700 / £2,300 / A$4,400 |
| Fractional DevOps Engineer | 20 hrs/week: deploy hygiene, monitoring, infrastructure upkeep | $1,000 ≈ €900 / £700 / A$1,400 · overage $12/hr |
| Fractional AI Research Engineer | 20 hrs/week: eval harnesses, model selection, inference cost tuning | $1,400 ≈ €1,200 / £1,000 / A$2,000 · overage $16/hr |
| Fractional Solution Architect | 20 hrs/week: architecture direction, design reviews, roadmap sanity | $1,700 ≈ €1,500 / £1,300 / A$2,400 · overage $19/hr |
Worked Example
A common starting team: a full-time Backend + AI engineer building the product, with fractional DevOps keeping deploys and infrastructure honest. Here is the entire invoice — salaries in rupees, so you can check them against the Indian market yourself.
| Line | What it is | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| 1 × Backend + AI Engineer (full-time) | Engineer salary | ₹1,50,000 (≈ $1,574) |
| 1 × Fractional DevOps (20 hrs/wk) | Engineer salary | ₹82,500 (≈ $866) |
| Engineer salaries subtotal | What we pay, before our margin | ₹2,32,500 (≈ $2,440) |
| NavyaAI overhead (20%) | Our entire margin, itemized | $460 |
| Monthly total | Invoiced in USD · cancel or rescale monthly | $2,900 ≈ €2,500 / £2,100 / A$4,100 |
Rounding to the nearest $100 is applied per role list price. The same math powers the calculator above — pick your own roles and check it.
$47K → $28K
Case study: a Llama 3 70B production workload moved from 4 GPUs to 2 with INT8 quantization, KV-cache pruning, and serving changes — a 42% monthly cost cut with 2.3x throughput.
Read the full auditQualified Intake
A 30-minute call maps your roadmap to a team shape — full-time, fractional, or mixed — with the itemized monthly cost confirmed before any commitment. Scale up, down, or cancel monthly.
Founder experience — US roles & engagements at
Code and Theory (Stagwell Group)ProsciaWolframHeyNeoTeCSAR Lab · UNC Charlotte
Shipped Work
Products we've engineered and clients we've served — real platforms in production, not slideware.
Construction execution platform for PMC firms — phase-gated workflows, tamper-proof site records, and snag-to-handover tracking that replaces spreadsheets and WhatsApp threads.
Full-stack platform: Next.js, Postgres, async job pipeline, field-team mobile flows.
Secure AI chatbots for HR, support, and sales — RAG-powered answers from company documents with audit trails, aligned to GDPR and SOC 2 expectations.
RAG platform end to end: ingestion, retrieval, guardrails, multi-tenant serving.
SEO, AEO & GEO intelligence engine for developers — triple scoring, Search Console integration, and CLI-first plus MCP agent workflows.
Agent-first product: MCP server, site crawler, scoring engines, WordPress control plane.
AI creative strategist — learns a brand from its URL and generates on-brand ads, video, and copy built to convert, in minutes.
Generative pipeline: brand ingestion to multi-format creative output.
Programmatic SEO platform — generate, preview, and publish thousands of service + location pages in minutes. Trusted by 500+ SEO professionals.
Page-generation engine: templating, bulk preview, and publishing at 50K+ pages scale.
Web design and development agency serving UAE brands — high-volume portfolio of business sites built for speed and search.
Engineering partner: platform performance and search infrastructure.
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FAQ
Full-time: QA/test engineers from $600 ≈ €500 / £400 / A$900/month, frontend from $1,300 ≈ €1,100 / £1,000 / A$1,900/month, backend + AI and DevOps from $1,900 ≈ €1,700 / £1,400 / A$2,700/month, AI research engineers from $2,500 ≈ €2,200 / £1,900 / A$3,600/month, and solution architects from $3,100 ≈ €2,700 / £2,300 / A$4,400/month. Fractional (20 hrs/week) DevOps, AI research, and architecture seats run $1,000-$1,700/month. Every price is the engineer's salary plus a flat 20% overhead, itemized on the invoice.
Because we don't pretend otherwise: we are an Indian agency, and the prices are Indian salaries plus 20%. A backend + AI engineer here is paid ₹1,50,000/month — above the Indian services-industry median — which lands at $1,900/month for you all-in. Vetted marketplaces charge $55-200/hour for comparable talent and keep the split private. The cost advantage is geography, not seniority — and we publish the math so you never have to wonder.
Yes — the rupee figures in the calculator are our actual salary bands, deliberately set above the Indian services-industry median. In India these are strong senior salaries; paying above market is our retention strategy, and the swap-guarantee record depends on it. Overlap hours with your timezone and disciplined internal processes are how the economics work without cutting the engineer's share.
Automatic AI progress tracking is included with every seat: an AI agent watches your repositories and task boards and sends a daily plain-English report — what each engineer shipped, what's in flight, what's blocked, and hours against plan for fractional seats. 100% visibility without scheduling a status call. You also keep direct access: your standups, your Slack, your tracker.
Each invoice shows two lines per seat: the engineer's salary and NavyaAI's 20% overhead, which covers vetting, management, the replacement guarantee, and payroll. That's our entire margin. Typical staff-augmentation platforms quote a blended hourly rate and keep the split private — independent reviews estimate 40-60% of those rates never reach the engineer.
Nothing silent. Fractional plans include 20 hours/week; if a sprint needs more, we ask first, you approve in writing, and the extra hours bill at the role's fixed hourly rate stated in the contract. No surprise line items, ever.
Most seats are filled from our senior bench within two weeks of the planning call. Every plan includes a swap guarantee: if a seat isn't working, we replace the engineer at no cost, and you can scale down or cancel monthly.
Yes — your repositories, your project tracker, your Slack, your standups, with deliberate timezone overlap for US, Canada, UK, EU, and Australian teams. All work product is yours from the first commit, with IP assignment standard in the contract.
If you have a defined product to prove, start with the 14-day MVP sprint — fixed scope, fixed price. If you have an ongoing roadmap, a team plan is the better economics: the same senior engineers, embedded continuously, at a monthly price you can audit. Many clients sprint first, then convert to a team plan.
