What AI consulting actually costs a small business

In short: Almost every firm in this category hides pricing behind a contact form. Here is our actual price list, the second bill that arrives after ours, and what a suspiciously cheap quote is really buying you.

Key takeaways

• An audit runs $3,000 to $5,000. A build runs $8,000 to $30,000 depending on how many systems it touches. Ongoing work runs $500 to $10,000 a month depending on what it is.
• A build is typically 10 to 30 hours of senior engineering time. A quote that implies far less than that is selling you a demo, not a deployment.
• There is a second bill. The software your system runs on is not part of the consulting fee, it renews every month, and it is the number most proposals leave out.
• The biggest driver of a project going over is not technical difficulty. It is being scoped without full visibility into how the operation actually runs.

The price list

Here is what we charge. I am publishing it because the alternative is a contact form, a discovery call, and a proposal three days later before anyone will tell you a number. That wastes your time and mine.

Discovery call. Free, thirty minutes, always. If we get off that call and the honest answer is that you should not buy anything from us yet, that is the answer you get.

AI readiness audit: $3,000 to $5,000. We map how your operation actually runs, identify five to ten places where AI would take real work off your team, and hand back a prioritized plan with what each one would cost to build. You own the document. You are free to take it to another firm or build it in house. There is a longer piece on [what an audit actually answers](/blog/five-questions-every-audit-answers).

Custom build: $8,000 to $15,000 for a single system, $15,000 to $30,000 for something that spans several. A single system is one workflow end to end. Several systems means the thing has to talk to your CRM, your accounting software, and your phone line, and each of those connections is its own small project.

Tool selection and implementation: $5,000 to $12,000. You do not need something custom built. You need someone to pick the right off the shelf product, configure it properly, connect it to what you already run, and train your team on it.

Voice agents: a setup fee, then about $1,000 a month. This is our most requested build and the one with the clearest before and after.

Search and content work: $500 to $3,000 a month. Wide band because the work is genuinely different at each end of it.

Ongoing retainer: $2,500 to $5,000 a month standard, $5,000 to $10,000 premium. This is not maintenance in the sense of waiting for something to break. It is someone continuing to build, monitoring what is running, and fixing the things you would not have caught.

Every custom build has both a setup fee and a monthly fee. If a proposal has a setup fee and no monthly fee, ask what happens when the API on the other end changes. Something on the other end always changes.

Why an audit costs three to five thousand dollars

Because the work underneath it is ten to thirty hours of a senior engineer's time, and that engineer is the same person who has to build the thing afterward.

Do the division yourself. That is the point of publishing the hours alongside the price. When someone quotes you $800 for an AI audit, they are not more efficient than us. They are running your business description through a language model and sending you the output. You can do that yourself in an afternoon and keep the $800.

The reason the hours are what they are is that most of an audit is not technical. It is sitting with the person who actually does the work and watching what they do, because what people describe when you ask them how a process works and what actually happens on a Tuesday are two different processes. The gap between those two is where every real automation opportunity lives, and you cannot find it from a questionnaire.

The second bill

This is the part that gets left out of proposals, including, historically, some of ours.

Our fee is for the work. The system we build for you runs on software that bills you separately, every month, forever. Depending on what we build, that can include an automation platform, a model API that charges per use, a phone carrier, a database, and sometimes a seat on a product you did not previously pay for.

None of that is enormous. All of it is real, and it does not stop. Before you sign anything with anyone, ask for the monthly running cost of the system separately from the monthly fee for the humans, and ask what happens to that number if your volume doubles. Usage based pricing is fine. Usage based pricing you find out about in month four is not.

The honest framing is that a system with a $1,000 monthly fee is not a $1,000 a month decision. It is a $1,000 plus running costs decision, and the person selling it to you should be able to tell you both numbers before you sign.

What a cheap quote is buying you

We lose deals on price. Sometimes that is the right outcome, because there are businesses that should be spending $200 a month on a good off the shelf product instead of $8,000 with us, and when that is true I will say it on the discovery call.

But the cheap quotes that go wrong go wrong in a predictable way. Someone builds the happy path. It works in the demo. Then it meets your actual inbox, where a large share of the messages are formatted differently than the sample they tested on, and the system starts producing confident wrong answers that nobody catches for weeks. We have written about [why most AI pilots die after the demo](/blog/why-most-ai-pilots-die-after-the-demo), and the short version is that the cases the system gets wrong are the actual job. The cases it gets right are the demo. Pricing that only covers the demo is not cheaper. It is a deposit on doing the whole thing again.

The specific questions to ask any quote, ours included:

1. How many hours of engineering time is this, and who is doing them?
2. What happens to my system when the software on the other end changes?
3. What is my monthly running cost, separate from your fee?
4. Can my team turn it off without calling you?
5. What is the plan for the cases it gets wrong?

A firm that cannot answer question five has not thought about your operation. They have thought about the model.

What actually moves the price

Not complexity. Visibility.

The engagements of ours that have gone over on time or scope share one thing. We priced them without full sight of how the operation really ran. Someone described a process, we scoped against the description, and then during the build we found the four exceptions that everyone in the business handles by habit and nobody thinks to mention. Those exceptions are not edge cases to the business. They are Tuesday. And they are half the build.

That is the argument for the audit as a separate paid engagement rather than free pre sales work. Not because we want another line item, but because a build priced on top of a real map of your operation is priced correctly, and a build priced on top of a conversation is a guess. If you take the audit and go elsewhere with it, you will still get a better quote from whoever you hire, because they will be quoting against something real. That sequencing is the whole reason we work in [audit, build, operate](/blog/audit-build-operate-model) rather than quoting a build off a first call.

What to do with this

1. Get the number on the first call. If a firm will not give you a band before a proposal, that is information about how they work.
2. Ask for the running cost separately from the fee. Both numbers, in writing, before you sign.
3. Divide the quote by a plausible number of engineering hours. If the result is implausible, you are buying a demo.
4. Pay for the map before you pay for the build. A scoped build is priced. An unscoped build is a guess, and guesses go over.
5. If your honest read is that you are too small for any of this right now, that is a real answer and the right firm will tell you so.