How much does a Palantir Foundry build cost?

Separate the licence from the build

Two costs get conflated. The Foundry licence is a commercial arrangement with Palantir and varies enormously with scale. The build — making the platform do something useful for your business — is engineering work, and it is the part you control. This page is about the second.

What actually drives build cost

Three things. The number of source systems to connect and how clean their data is. The size of the ontology you need before the first useful application works. And the number of people on the build team, because large teams spend most of their time co-ordinating. A forty-person programme can consume a year before anyone outside the project sees a screen. A small senior team building one ontology slice and one Workshop app can be live in six to twelve weeks.

Why most Foundry builds are scoped too large

Because the platform can do almost anything, the temptation is to model everything before building anything. The better pattern is the opposite: pick the one workflow where the business feels pain weekly, model only the objects it needs, build the app or agent, put it in users' hands, then widen. Each slice pays for the next.

What a fixed-scope first build looks like

At Treefrog a first Foundry or AIP build is a fixed-scope engagement: a remote workshop to design the system your team actually wants, an ontology slice of three to six object types, one Workshop application or one AIP agent, built in your tenancy with weekly demos, documented and handed over. Six to twelve weeks. The price is agreed up front and depends on the number of sources and the complexity of the agent, so we give it after the workshop rather than guess it here. Thirty minutes on a call will get you a range.

The hidden cost: how fast can you change it?

A Foundry build is never finished; the value is in the second and third iteration. The standard AIP developer tooling is slow enough that a simple change to a Workshop app can take the better part of an hour, which quietly multiplies the cost of every iteration. We have developed a way of working that turns those changes around in minutes. Ask about it, because it is the biggest single factor in what a Foundry build costs over its life.

Frequently asked