What a teamwould have cost.
The talk’s result priced twice: as a Swiss delivery team, and as it happened with agentic AI. The owner’s hours count in both.
Counts are from git as of , like every figure in the talk. Estimates are marked, stated with their basis, and can be changed below.
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What was built
Both bills buy the same result: two products, CompanyGraph and GuestGraph, and this site on a model of its own. Every figure here is counted.
The two bills
One scale for both. The owner’s hours are the same color in both, because they are paid in both.
| Line | Conventional | Agentic AI |
|---|---|---|
| The owner’s hours | h | h |
| The delivery team | person-months | — |
| Tools, AI and hosting | licenses | as paid |
Time, and the owner’s time
The team takes longer from start to live. The owner’s hours barely change, which is the talk’s point: the time building saved went into deciding.
The team it would take
A Swiss team at market rates, available from the first day. Its person-months are estimated per workstream below; the conservative case matches the measured code at about lines of tested code per person-month.
| Role | FTE | Person-months | CHF an hour | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tech lead and solution architect | ||||
| Senior backend engineers | ||||
| Senior frontend engineers | ||||
| UX and UI designer | ||||
| DevOps and platform engineer | ||||
| QA and test engineer | ||||
| Business analyst and knowledge modeler | ||||
| Technical writer and translator | ||||
| Delivery manager | ||||
| Owner and lead, at a lead architect’s market rate in both | ||||
| The delivery team |
Where the person-months go
What it actually took
One person with Claude Code, from the first commit on to . The hours are the days git shows work, times the hours a day the owner gives.
| Line | Basis | CHF |
|---|---|---|
| The owner, from | days with commits × h | |
| The owner, before | days with commits × h | |
| Claude subscription as paid | Max 5x until mid-June, then Max 20x: USD , plus Swiss VAT | |
| Narration voice as paid | USD of ElevenLabs credit | |
| The chats’ API as paid | USD of Anthropic credit for Sonnet 5, plus VAT | |
| Google Cloud hosting counted | Six services that scale to zero, inside the free tier | |
| Two domains estimated | companygraph.io and guestgraph.io for a year | |
| Agentic total |
The AI was the smallest line: of the total. At the API’s list price instead of the subscription, USD , the total would be , still × cheaper. The cost moved to the owner’s hours, which is where the deciding is.
Would both approaches produce the same result?
Not quite. A good Swiss team could match each bar here, spec by spec and test by test. At this pace it would deliver less scope and write down less of its reasoning, and it would bring what one person with agents lacks: independent review, real users and shared ownership. The evidence is counted; the rating is the owner’s judgment.
| Dimension | Evidence from this build | Could a team do the same? | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Specification | specs and plans, written before the code, with decisions each traced to a quote; revised later and dropped, so they were used. | Yes. The decisions are the owner’s either way, but writing them down at this depth costs an architect weeks a quarter, and most teams cut it first. | Agentic ahead |
| Implementation | revert in commits, and pull requests closed without merging: the gate turned work away. | Yes. Senior engineers write code like this and bring judgment from years in production, which an agent has only when the owner supplies it. | Even |
| Tests | lines of tests for every ten of code; the plugin tested end to end in a real Obsidian; CI on every change. | Yes, and the team includes a QA engineer for it. Under a deadline, tests are the second thing a team trims. | Agentic ahead |
| Consistency | One set of conventions in every repository, rolled out in release waves. | Hard. Style and wording drift between people; linting gets a team close. | Agentic ahead |
| Scope and iteration | Ideas prototyped and declined within a day; two products and three models in about fifteen weeks. | A team runs fewer experiments, since each costs a sprint, and scopes smaller. Often healthy, but a different product. | Agentic ahead |
| German and English | Every page in both, with a translator’s review and a glossary. | Yes. A professional translator is the standard for Swiss Standard German. | Even |
| Independent review | The owner is the only human reviewer; agents review agents, and the owner merges. | Better: two people on every change, and security review by someone who did not write it. | Team ahead |
| Design with users | One person’s judgment, refined in review; no usability or accessibility study with real users. | Better: a designer with user research sees what the builder cannot. | Team ahead |
| Ownership | One person holds the context; the specs write the reasoning down, which lowers the risk without removing it. | Better: the knowledge is spread across the team. | Team ahead |
| Operations | Every host deploys through CI; there is no on-call and no service level. | Better with a DevOps engineer. Neither side’s running costs are counted. | Team ahead |
Closing the gaps where the team is ahead — an external code and security review, a usability and accessibility study, a month to bring in a second maintainer — adds about . The agentic total would then be , still × cheaper.
These are counts from git, not an audit. Nobody outside the project has reviewed the code, so the implementation row compares capability, not a measured outcome.
How the figures are made
Employer cost is the salary × for social charges and workplace, over productive hours a year. Salaries sit at the Zurich market middle, a senior engineer at against a reported average of about CHF 137,000 (Levels.fyi, Glassdoor).
Contractor rates are CHF – an hour, inside the reported day rates of CHF 850–1,500 for Swiss IT contractors (salary2freelance).
The owner is priced as a lead architect at market rate, on the employer basis or CHF an hour, not at what he earns or charges.
Dollars are converted at , near the 2026 average. Anthropic bills Switzerland in dollars, plus VAT.
What this leaves out
Hiring the team, which in Switzerland usually takes three to six months before the months above begin. The meetings and handovers a larger team needs. Running costs on either side. The risk the talk names: the speed rests on a few providers’ prices and terms.