IN SHORT
- What disappears is the small custom build priced by the week: internal tools, simple portals, the fifth CRM for a client who needed four screens.
- What survives and gets more valuable is everything around it - deciding what to build, integrating with what exists, migrating data, and being accountable when it breaks.
- You can also resell the platform under your own brand, with your own prices. The partner tier draws 5,000 credits a month, 12 seats and 1 consultation hour.
- The honest version: if your whole business is billing hours for work a model now does in minutes, this is a real problem and no framing makes it not one.
What actually goes away
The small custom build. Internal tools, simple client portals, the CRM that was really four screens and a report - work that was quoted in weeks and is now quoted in days, at a price that no longer supports an agency's overhead.
This category was never the good part of an agency's book. It was the work that filled gaps between larger projects, ran over, generated support requests for years and was priced by what the client would tolerate rather than by what it was worth.
It is worth being precise about the boundary, though. What has collapsed is the cost of producing a first working version. The cost of knowing which version to produce has not moved at all, and on a lot of projects that was always the larger share.
What becomes more valuable
Judgement, integration, migration and accountability. All four were previously bundled invisibly into a build price, and all four are now separable and chargeable on their own.
That last row is the one agencies undervalue. A business buying software is buying somebody to blame, and no amount of AI removes the demand for a name on a contract.
| What | Why it survives |
|---|---|
| Deciding what to build | A model builds what it is told. Knowing what to tell it is the job |
| Integrating with what exists | Accounting software, warehouses, banks, the machine on the shop floor |
| Migrating data | Fifteen years of inconsistent records is still a human problem |
| Being accountable | Somebody has to answer the phone when it is wrong on a Friday |
The three models that work
Build faster and keep the margin, resell the platform under your own brand, or specialise in the work that never got automated. Most agencies end up doing two of the three.
- Build faster, quote the same: the client buys an outcome and does not price your keystrokes. Margin improves quietly and nobody has to be told
- Resell under your own brand: your name, your prices, your customers in your own database, with the platform underneath
- Specialise upwards: integrations, migrations, regulated work, the systems where being wrong is expensive
- What does not work: competing on the price of producing a first version. That price is heading towards the cost of the credits
The arithmetic of reselling
Credits cost you what they cost and you set your own retail price. A pack of 15,000 credits is €199 today; what you charge a client for the system you build with it is between you and the client.
The recurring side is small and predictable: keeping systems running draws 1,250 credits a month per account, not per system, so an agency running six client systems on one account draws once.
The partner tier exists for this: 5,000 credits a month, 12 seats and 1 consultation hour a month, which does not roll over if unused. It is capped deliberately at a number of places rather than sold to everyone, because the consultation hour is a real hour of a real person.
What to tell a client who asks whether they could do it themselves
Yes, and say so. The clients who would have done it themselves were going to find out anyway, and the ones who ask are usually testing whether you are honest rather than shopping.
The useful follow-up is a question rather than a defence: what happens when it breaks on a Friday, who migrates the fifteen years of records, and who talks to their accountant's software. If they have good answers, they should build it themselves and you should stay friendly, because they will call about the next thing.
The agencies that will struggle are the ones whose answer to this question is a longer version of "it is complicated". Clients can check that claim now, in an afternoon, for the price of a small pack of credits.
The part that is genuinely bad news
If your business is billing hours for work a model now does in minutes, this is a real problem, and no reframing makes it not one.
Nothing in this article is meant to soften that. An agency whose revenue is production hours on small builds is facing a price collapse in its main product, and the honest advice is to move the business towards judgement work quickly rather than to wait and see whether it is exaggerated.
The timing in Bulgaria is unusually favourable for making that move, and that is measurable rather than hopeful. Eurostat puts AI use among Bulgarian companies at 8.6% and basic digital intensity among small firms at 38.3%, against an EU average of 71.4%. The market of businesses that have not yet built anything is enormous, and it is the market that needs somebody to tell it what to build.
QUESTIONS
Can I put my own brand on it?
Yes. Your name, your colours, your prices, your customers in your own database. The partners page sets out how the reseller arrangement works.
What margin is realistic?
It is the difference between what credits cost you and what you charge for the outcome, and it is entirely yours to set. Nobody publishes a recommended retail price for your work.
Do my clients need to know the platform is underneath?
That is your decision. Under a reseller arrangement they see your brand throughout.
What about the developers I employ?
The work moves up rather than away: describing systems properly, reviewing what came out, integrations, migrations and the parts a model gets confidently wrong. The people who were good at understanding a business remain the valuable ones.
RELATED
Partners - how reselling under your own brand works
What vibe coding cannot do - the boundary you can sell against, honestly
What it really costs - the input side of your own arithmetic
The launch service - what a fixed-fee build looks like when a client wants one