How to buy bespoke AI software without getting burned
What to insist on in the contract, the architecture and the handover, whoever you build with.
Bespoke software has a bad reputation for good reasons. Here’s what to insist on, whether you build with us or with anyone else.
Ownership, in writing
Source code, infrastructure accounts and data transfer to you. If the vendor holds the cloud account, you don’t own the system, you rent it.
A specification before a price
A fixed price against a vague brief is a fixed price for an argument later. Pay for a short scoping phase and get a written specification out of it, even if you then take that specification elsewhere.
Model providers behind an abstraction
The model you launch on won’t be the model you run in two years. If provider calls are scattered through the codebase, switching is a rewrite. It should be one adapter.
An explicit answer on data
- Which provider receives your data, and in which region
- Whether that provider trains on it
- What’s retained, and for how long
- What happens to it on termination
A handover that assumes you’ll leave
Documentation, a runbook, a working local setup and a deployment another engineer can perform. If leaving the vendor is expensive, the price you agreed wasn’t the real price.