AI Prompt Engineering MRR dropped 18% as clients build in-house

Our agency saw monthly recurring revenue fall from $42k to $34k in Q3 as enterprise clients hired internal teams. The average cost-per-output for custom fine-tunes is now $0.04, making generic prompt consulting unviable. Retention hinges on delivering proprietary data pipelines, not just prompt libraries. Churn hit 12% last month among clients who only bought strategy decks.