Just for example, I run a team of 10 machine learning engineers at a large ecommerce company. We mostly do NLP and computer vision, some time series forecasting.
I cannot imagine ever paying anything close to $25k for consulting advice, that’s just bananas to me. We recently purchased licenses to use the data annotation tool prodigy from the spaCy creators at explosion.ai. That was ~$4000 and the decision whether to build our own data annotation system or not was excruciating, involved all kinds of business documentation, RFCs, approvals, NDA processes, etc. It was deeply non-trivial to procure that, and building our own was a very serious option we pursued with tech specs and prototypes and everything.
Spending 6x that amount for _advice_ about NLP, which practically grows on trees today, is just totally unrealistic.
It makes me suspect the real target customer for you is not companies with actual ML engineering teams or ambitious data-driven projects, but more like someone looking for McKinsey-lite. Some place that has no serious ML use case beyond drop-in pretrained models and sees $25k as the cheaper path to rubber stamp certification that dissolves internal political feuds. Most likely just selling super cookie cutter NLP models as if they are advanced and represent some sexy leap forward for a company with a couple junior data scientists. Algolia or just some drop-in Elastic tfidf search is more than enough for these companies. Spend the $25k on an intern who can tell you anything you need to know about neural network frameworks.
In reality, the 4-5 ML engineers you already hired are very likely more knowledgeable than the freelance consultant you might hire. They can tell you much more about state of the art and simultaneously know the specific integration path in your company’s web service and data ecosystem. Those folks won’t be wasting time prototyping - they would be pursuing a more efficient way to get the answers you need than advice from a freelancer, even if that freelancer was Bengio for pete’s sake.
I just cannot see the value prop here except for the usual story of paying for consulting as a virtue signal / credential / politics kind of thing.