I recently read that the big US tech companies spent 100 billion USD on AI during the last two years. For a set of tools that, by and large, can be used for free. Sounds great, right? The thing is just that when something sounds too good to be true, it often is. You really think we’re not going to pay for it? Of course we are! Every time your company renews its contract with one of these companies, you will start to pay for it. However, as a proud European, I would very much like us to decrease our dependency on non-european entities. We have a choice, of course. There are quite a few open source alternatives for Agentic AI that perform as well or close to as the top closed source models. On top of that, many companies realize that their cost for use of public clouds is going through the roof and that it is actually much more cost effective to run a private cloud, even if you have to have some competence in house to run it. So, next time you listen to a pitch that sounds really good, reflect for a moment whether it sounds too good to be true.