How is this different from hiring a development agency?

An agency prices the brief you bring. I question the brief first, and a meaningful share of the time the honest answer is a smaller build, a product you can buy, or nothing at all. After that the delivery looks similar, and I am happy to specify the work and oversee your agency building it rather than replace them. What you are buying is the decision and the specification, not extra hands.

Do we need to train our own model?

Almost certainly not. Training needs a quantity of labelled data most companies do not have, costs a great deal, and the result falls behind the general models within a year. Nearly every business case is solved by giving a general model controlled access to your own material and systems. If a case genuinely needs a trained model, that is a finding from the assessment rather than an assumption at the start.

Does our data have to stay inside the UAE?

It depends on what the data is, which regime you sit under, and what you have told customers. Some categories can be processed abroad with the right agreements in place, some cannot, and a company inside the DIFC or the ADGM answers to a different set of rules from a mainland one. It is answered in the first week, in writing, because it decides the architecture, and an architecture changed afterwards is a rebuild.

How long before something real is in use?

Six to ten weeks for a first slice that real users touch, on a narrow case using data you already hold. Longer usually means the scope was never narrowed or the data turned out to live somewhere nobody had checked. I would rather cut scope than move the date, because eight weeks of real use teaches you more than a larger system still in testing.

What happens when the model we built on is retired?

It will be, roughly every year. The build keeps the model behind a boundary in your own code instead of scattering provider-specific calls through the application, and the acceptance set exists so that changing model becomes a test run rather than a rebuild. Ask any supplier how they intend to handle it, and treat a vague answer as a price you will pay later.

Book: First working version

Tell me who you are. You pay on the next screen.

First working version — AED 23,200.00, paid today. A scoped first phase: the core of the application running in production, delivered in weekly increments, with the scope written and agreed before we start, documentation and training at handover, and full ownership of everything built.

Running costs. Quoted once the first version works, and billed separately.