# DEPT vs OstraconAI

> Comparing AI Marketing options: Amsterdam vs Helsinki. Side by side: published rates, team size, service and industry coverage, and the curator's assessment of both — pairings are never sold.

Canonical page: https://www.aiagencies.eu/compare/dept-vs-ostraconai
Generated: 2026-09-23 · Curated by Gabor Kiss · No paid placements — inclusion, score, and rank are never sold.

## Facts
| | DEPT | OstraconAI |
|---|---|---|
| Editorial score | 64/100 | 60/100 |
| Hourly rate | €130-170/hr (directory-listed) | €250-400/hr (agency-confirmed) |
| Team size | 1000-9999 | 10-49 |
| Location | Amsterdam, Netherlands | Helsinki, Finland |
| Founded | 2016 | 2024 |
| Last reviewed | 2026-08-06 | 2026-09-23 |
| Services | AI Development, AI Marketing, Generative AI | AI Consulting, AI Marketing, AI Automation |
| Industries | SaaS & B2B | Healthcare, E-commerce, SaaS & B2B, FinTech |

## Our take on DEPT
Reviewed 2026-08-06 by Gabor Kiss against published evidence.

Signs is the most visible AI work here: a sign-language learning platform using computer vision to check the learner's signing, which reached more than 20 million people in its first week and recorded 20,000 signs learned in ten days. It is a collaboration with NVIDIA and the American Society for Deaf Children rather than a commissioned client project, which is worth knowing when you read it as evidence.

The commissioned AI work is more ordinary and more useful as a guide: a return-value prediction model for the fashion retailer Omoda that fed its marketing hub, Clair for CaryHealth, a reference app its own case study credits with 90% faster clinical search, and nine CGI avatars generated for Inter's INTERISTA fan platform, published as 13.5 times faster and 92% cheaper than the comparable manual workflow.

Size is the real variable: DEPT operates across many markets, so who staffs your project matters more here than at a twenty-person firm.

The weaker fit is an enterprise wanting a production AI system governed and operated long-term; this bench is strongest where AI meets the audience.

### Key strengths
- Named clients with figures attached across three sectors: retail returns, clinical search, sports fan engagement
- Computer vision applied to genuinely hard interaction problems, not generative demos
- International delivery capacity, so multi-market rollouts do not need a second agency

### Good to know
- Signs is collaborative work with NVIDIA, not a client engagement—judge the commissioned cases separately
- Published AI work is weighted toward audience-facing products—ask for an operated system with an SLA if that is what you need
- At this scale, insist on knowing the named team, not the agency's aggregate credentials

## Our take on OstraconAI
Reviewed 2026-09-23 by Gabor Kiss against published evidence.

Eleven case studies are published and every client is named, splitting into five internal tools, three AI-assisted outbound campaigns and three strategy or roadmap engagements.

The deployment detail is strongest at Singa: an n8n and Gemini pipeline that enriches, scores and routes inbound leads into HubSpot, live in week three, with a Slack channel for flagging errors and prompts tuned weekly—manual lead sorting went from 45 minutes a day to single-digit minutes.

Nordic Healthcare Group's Azure RAG reference search has been in use since August 2025 and S-Group runs a Copilot Studio planning agent, but neither study publishes usage or accuracy numbers, and every build sits on a platform (n8n, Copilot Studio, Azure, Claude) rather than a model OstraconAI trained or hosts.

The weaker fit is buyers who need custom models, data engineering or AI outside marketing and sales—nothing published goes beyond that remit.

### Key strengths
- All 11 case studies name the client, and most quote a named executive with title—Sanoma Media Finland's Chief Commercial Officer, S-Group's Head of Marketing Strategies, Singa's CCO
- The Gosta Labs study publishes its funnel: 3,930 messages, 198 replies and 62 opportunities across three oncology congresses, with the best campaign near a 19% reply rate
- Handover is part of the delivery: Claude Code training at Barona and Claude training at Olo-apteekki so the client team maintains the tools itself

### Good to know
- Several headline numbers are forecasts or quotes—Attendo is 'about to save' 9,000 hours, Sanoma's 'millions of euros' is an estimate—ask which figures were measured after launch
- The hourly rate on this listing sits well above the European range on our rate index, while the site prices by project and monthly retainer—ask how many hours the retainer buys
- Builds run on n8n, Copilot Studio, Azure, Clay, Apollo and Instantly—ask who owns the workflows and accounts, and who monitors them after the engagement ends

## Which to choose
Choose DEPT for:
- a more cost-effective engagement (~54% lower rate)
- larger team capacity for multi-stream or enterprise-scale programs
- broader service offering — also covers AI Development and Generative AI
- a higher overall editorial score

Choose OstraconAI for:
- closer collaboration at a smaller team scale
- disclosed specialization in Healthcare / E-commerce
- broader service offering — also covers AI Consulting and AI Automation

## Questions buyers ask

### Which is cheaper, DEPT or OstraconAI?
DEPT is cheaper by roughly 54% — €150/hr median vs €325/hr at OstraconAI. Published rates cover different things at different agencies — seniority mix, discovery and included revisions are the usual variables — so treat the gap as a question to ask, not a verdict.

### Which has more SaaS & B2B experience, DEPT or OstraconAI?
Both agencies show documented SaaS & B2B work. OstraconAI has the broader industry stack overall, with disclosed experience in Healthcare, E-commerce, FinTech beyond their shared focus.

### Which scores higher overall, DEPT or OstraconAI?
DEPT scores 64/100, 4 points higher than OstraconAI at 60/100. Both portfolio quality and business credibility feed into the score — see our methodology for the full breakdown.

### Which is faster to engage, DEPT or OstraconAI?
Neither publishes lead times, so this is a read on team size rather than a measured answer. OstraconAI runs the smaller team, which usually means fewer procurement gates and a shorter path to kickoff. DEPT runs a larger one, which tends to mean more steps but more capacity to start parallel workstreams. Current kickoff availability is the number that actually decides it — ask both.

### When should I consider both DEPT and OstraconAI?
Consider running parallel discovery briefs with DEPT and OstraconAI if your project spans multiple workstreams, you want competitive proposals to compare scope and approach, or you're undecided between the specialization angles each brings (see the Best for cards above). Most engagements ultimately go with one — but the parallel-brief phase is a low-cost way to validate fit.

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Source: AIAgencies.eu — the curated register of European AI agencies. Rate provenance: "agency-confirmed" = disclosed via submission or claimed profile; "directory-listed" = Clutch or two agreeing B2B directories (lone unverified sources are never written). Full method: https://www.aiagencies.eu/methodology · Rate index: https://www.aiagencies.eu/rates