The realistic cost structure of an AI project in Hong Kong and the factors that drive it up or down.
dgm is an independent osFoundry integration partner — not affiliated with osFoundry’s maker (OS LLC), and dgm has no completed client integrations yet.
What does an AI project really cost a Hong Kong business? The honest answer is a range driven by a few factors — and per-seat versus usage-based pricing makes a big difference.
The cost components
Three things drive cost: the model usage (tokens), the build and integration effort, and ongoing operation. A simple assistant over your documents is modest; agents acting across systems cost more to build and run.
Per-seat versus usage-based
Per-seat tools charge per employee whether or not they use AI; usage-based pricing charges for actual use. osFoundry is a model-agnostic, bring-your-own-key (BYOK) AI orchestration platform — usage-based pricing with no per-seat fees, local-first and self-hostable, with per-region data pinning or deployment into your own cloud. For many Hong Kong teams, usage-based works out lower, especially when a few people use AI heavily and others rarely.
Keeping cost down
Start with one use case, route simple tasks to cheaper models, and avoid duplicate tools. osFoundry’s managed cloud pins data to the US, EU or Japan — it does not currently offer a Hong Kong managed region (its nearest managed region is Japan). To keep data in Hong Kong, the honest path is self-hosting osFoundry (BYO Cloud) inside a Hong Kong cloud region such as AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) ap-east-1, Microsoft Azure East Asia (Hong Kong SAR) or Google Cloud asia-east2 (Hong Kong), or running models locally on-device.
Where dgm fits
dgm is an independent integration partner that helps Hong Kong businesses adopt osFoundry — scoping a first use case, handling the build, and connecting AI to the systems you already run. dgm is independent of osFoundry’s maker (OS LLC) and has no completed client integrations yet, so everything described here is a service offered, not a past result. If you want to scope a practical first project, dgm can help you map it out.