At our Discern & Build day in September, we showed ministry leaders a slide we called “The team we couldn’t afford.” It estimated what seven months of work with Claude would have cost if we had hired it out: $215,000 to $320,000. Since then we have kept building, and people keep asking us what the number is now.
Here is our updated estimate, as of November 2026, with the method behind it. We’re publishing it as a dated snapshot because it will be out of date the next time we build something.
The short answer
From March to November 2026, Brilliance Labs paid about $1,100 in all for Claude. Our bill changed during the year: we started at full price, moved to Anthropic’s nonprofit pricing, and adjusted the number of seats as our staff’s needs changed. We estimate the same work would have cost $400,000 to $750,000 at market rates. None of our staff are programmers. Our training is in theological studies and cross-cultural leadership.
How we estimated it
For each project, we asked what a small agency or an experienced freelancer in the United States would typically charge to deliver something similar. We used a range rather than one number, because quotes vary widely. The first row is the estimate from our September talk, which covered March through September across eleven roles: web and app developers, a brand designer, a grant writer and grant administrator, a researcher, bookkeeping, marketing, legal and HR preparation, security testing, and event planning. The other rows are work that estimate didn’t include.
| Work | Estimated market cost |
|---|---|
| March–September, eleven roles (from our September talk) | $215K–$320K |
| Our private Bible research library: search engine, local AI models, our own MCP server, and its test suite | $60K–$120K |
| Two games and an interactive card deck: HODL Trail, The Discernment Files, and the Wisdom Deck | $45K–$120K |
| Genesis 3:16 Through the Centuries, a reception history study | $20K–$50K |
| Hopeful 2027: brand, website, seat reservations, and email | $25K–$45K |
| Sermon research reports and the daily study, including audio | $15K–$40K |
| Two short animated films | $10K–$30K |
| The Beginning with Moses reading plan | $5K–$10K |
| Relaunching brilliancelabs.org in our new brand | $5K–$15K |
| Added since September | $185K–$430K |
| Total, March–November 2026 | $400K–$750K |
These are our own rough estimates, prepared with Claude’s help. We have not collected quotes for each project.
What the number does and doesn’t mean
- It is a replacement cost, not money we saved. We could never have paid for most of this work. Without AI, most of these projects would not exist, so the honest comparison is between building them and not building them.
- It leaves out our own time. Our staff directed every project, made every decision, reviewed the work, and tested it. Those hours are real, and they aren’t in our subscription cost.
- It isn’t the same as an agency’s work. Some of what we built is rougher than a professional studio would deliver, and some of it is more specific to our needs than anything we could have bought.
- Our other tools cost money too. Hosting, the database, and design tools have their own subscriptions. We would pay for most of them whether or not we used AI.
Why we’re sharing it
Small ministries are told they can’t afford good tools. For most of the church’s history that has been true. A team of four with no programmers can now build what used to take a development budget, if it is careful about security, honest about what AI can and can’t do, and keeps people responsible for every decision.
That is what we help other ministries do through Ignite AI Consulting. You can see the projects themselves, and how we built them, on our portfolio page.