First question: what will you hold in your hands
An AI agency in Serbia today sells two different things under one name. One builds a flow that runs in your accounts tomorrow: an inquiry lands, gets an answer, goes into the CRM, a proposal is drafted. The other sells you an AI transformation strategy on forty slides and a workshop for the team. The first thing can be measured, the second cannot.
So the first question is not the price, it is the list of deliverables. Ask them to write down, before the quote, exactly what you will have when the job is done: which flows, in which tools, with what input and output. If the list does not fit on one page, they do not know yet what they are selling.
Ask for a one week trial
A first automation, one and useful, can be done within a week. That is a normal scope for someone who does this every day: site inquiries into the CRM with an automatic reply, or a report that writes itself on Monday morning. If an agency asks for a month and a workshop for that first piece, it sells hours, not results.
The trial gives you something more valuable than the flow: you see how they work. How much they ask, how much they promise, whether they write to you when something breaks.
Who owns the flow afterwards
This is the question that costs the most when it is not asked. An automation that lives in the agency's Make or n8n account, with their keys and their server, is not yours. When you part ways, it stops.
Ask for every flow to live in your accounts or on your server, for every key to be yours, for an export (n8n JSON, for example) and a short document someone else could read. If they cannot give you that, you are renting, not buying.
Price: fixed, in milestones
Automation by the hour is a risk you carry: every bug, every change in someone else's API, every round of tuning lands on your invoice. A fixed quote after a short call, paid in milestones, moves that risk to the one who knows the job.
With us that is a thirty minute call, then a quote with a number and a date within 48 hours. Not because we are fast, but because after the call we know the scope.
Data: where it goes and to whom
Every AI automation sends text somewhere. Ask three things: which model is used and under what terms (a business API does not train on your data, a free app often does), where the orchestration runs (n8n on your server in the EU or someone's cloud), and what exactly leaves your company at each step.
An agency that cannot name the model and draw the data path on a napkin does not know what it built.
What happens when an API breaks
Tools change. Meta renames a field, the CRM ships a version, the model gets a new name. A flow that worked in March quietly stops in June, and nobody notices until a customer writes. Ask who gets the alert when a flow fails, who fixes it and on what terms, and whether maintenance is in the price or agreed separately.
Seven questions for the first call
Bring them to the call, in order. The answers tell you everything.
- 01What exactly do I hold in my hands when the job is done?
- 02Can you deliver the first automation within a week?
- 03In whose accounts and on whose server does the flow live?
- 04Is the price fixed, and how is it paid in milestones?
- 05Which model do you use and which data leaves the company?
- 06Who gets the alert when a flow fails, and who fixes it?
- 07Can I see one flow that already runs for a client?
Where we stand in this
TIM Studio builds automations on n8n and Claude models, in the client's accounts, with a fixed quote in 48 hours and the first automation within a week. Stefan teaches the same flow in the Sve o AI community, to 175+ people, so there is nothing hidden in how we work. If you want to see it on your own case, write to us.