What if the cheapest fix for your broken AI agent is a stranger reading 40 hours of traces for $149?
I spent the last month doing exactly that — reading roughly 40 hours of production logs from teams running LangGraph, CrewAI, and AutoGen agents for paying customers. Not building observability dashboards. Not comparing LangSmith vs Langfuse. Reading the actual traces and writing up what was wrong, what to fix, and in what order.
Three observations from those 40 hours:
That second group is who I'm now building a $149 service for. Here's why I think it works, what the deliverable looks like, and where the limits are.
I tested three pricing models against the same deliverable: a written diagnostic of an agent's last 7 days of traces, prioritized fixes with code-level examples, and a 30-minute async follow-up.
| Model | Conversion | Avg revenue / inquiry | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| $200/hr (estimated 3hr) | 2/40 inquiries | $15 (lost 38 to sticker shock) | Freelance default, fails on cold traffic |
| $1,500 flat project | 0/40 inquiries | $0 | Above the "I'll just keep it broken" threshold for most small teams |
| $149 fixed diagnostic | |||
| 11/40 inquiries | |||
| $41 | |||
| Below "another contractor" threshold, above "free advice" |
The $149 number is the inversion point — low enough that a stressed eng lead can expense it without a meeting, high enough that the buyer self-selects as someone who actually needs help.
The point isn't $149. The point is the $149 turns into a $2k+ follow-up engagement about 40% of the time, because once I've read your logs I can scope the actual fix. The diagnostic is the offer; the implementation is the natural next step.
Every diagnostic I ship is a single 4-7 page markdown report with five sections:
I don't include dashboards. I don't include a LangSmith-style "view your traces" portal. I include a written report because the teams that need this are drowning in dashboards.
These aren't new. They're not framework-specific. They're the same shapes dressed up in different clothes:
I've written about each of these individually. What I hadn't realized until I started reading actual logs for money is that most teams have 3-4 of these at the same time, and they need someone to point at the intersection, not the individual pattern.
The intersection is where the money is. The intersection is also where a dashboard can't help.
Three things this service explicitly doesn't include, because the moment you offer them, it stops being a $149 diagnostic and starts being a $15k consulting engagement:
This is the same shape as a senior engineer doing a code review: read the code, write the comments, walk away. The team that needs help fixing an agent is rarely the team that needs help running an agent.
This is for: a 1-5 person eng team that shipped an AI agent to paying customers in the last 6 months, has observability data they're not reading, and is currently 1-2 weeks behind on agent reliability work.
This is not for: a Fortune 500 with a dedicated agent platform team. They have staff. They have LangSmith Enterprise. They have an agent SRE. They are not my customer.
This is also not for: a pre-launch team with no production traces. The diagnostic needs real data. I can review your pre-launch agent design as a different (longer, more expensive) engagement.
I priced the deliverable at $149 to test whether the inversion point hypothesis held — that there's a price below "hire a contractor" and above "free advice" where small teams will buy a written diagnostic.
So far the data is encouraging:
That's $70/hr effective, which is below the $200-$500/hr I could charge for hourly consulting — but the conversion rate is ~5x higher because the price is below the "I need to get budget approval" threshold. Two open questions I'm tracking:
The service is at miloantaeus.com/ai-ops-checkup. You send me 7 days of anonymized traces (LangSmith export, Helicone export, or whatever you have) and a one-paragraph description of what the agent is supposed to do. I send back a 4-7 page report in 5 business days. $149, fixed.
If your agent is in production and you haven't read your own traces in the last 30 days, this is probably the cheapest $149 you'll spend this quarter.