What AI automation actually costs
Published ranges, fixed scope per phase, and no hourly billing. You approve a number before anything gets built.
Automation pricing is usually hidden behind three discovery calls, which wastes everyone's time. Here is how we price, and roughly what comparable work costs elsewhere so you can sanity-check any quote you receive — including ours.
Cost is driven by four things: how many systems have to talk to each other, how messy the input data is, whether a human has to stay in the loop for compliance reasons, and how much of the process is genuinely unstructured. A workflow that moves clean data between two APIs is cheap. A workflow that reads scanned invoices in fourteen formats and posts them to accounting is not.
One-time build pricing
Pilot
$4,000 – $8,000
One workflow, 2–4 weeks
Small businesses proving the concept before committing budget.
- Process audit of one workflow
- One production automation or AI agent
- 2–3 system integrations
- Logging, alerts, and runbook
- Team walkthrough and handover
Operations build
$12,000 – $25,000
Multi-workflow, 6–12 weeks
Growing companies replacing manual coordination across the business.
- Full business process audit
- 3–6 production workflows
- Voice or chat AI agent with escalation
- CRM, phone, calendar, and billing integration
- Reporting dashboard
- Staff training and documentation
Transformation
$60,000+
Program, 3–9 months
Mid-market and enterprise teams with compliance and change-management requirements.
- Cross-department discovery and roadmap
- Security and data-governance review
- RAG or knowledge-base infrastructure
- Phased rollout with change management
- SLA-backed support
- Executive reporting
Monthly retainers
Automation is infrastructure. APIs change, prompts drift, and your business changes faster than either. A retainer keeps the system honest — but it is optional, and everything we build runs in your accounts if you would rather maintain it yourself.
Monitor
$750/mo
Uptime monitoring, alerting, and bug fixes on existing workflows.
Operate
$1,500 – $2,500/mo
Everything in Monitor plus prompt tuning, minor changes, and monthly reporting.
Partner
$4,000+/mo
A standing build allocation each month plus priority support and quarterly roadmap sessions.
Pricing questions
- Do you charge hourly?
- No. Every phase is fixed-price against a defined outcome, agreed in writing before work starts. Hourly billing rewards slow work and makes budgeting impossible.
- Is there a minimum engagement?
- The smallest thing we take on is a single-workflow pilot, typically $4,000 to $8,000. Below that, the audit and integration overhead outweighs the value.
- What is included in the monthly retainer?
- Monitoring, alerting, bug fixes, model and prompt tuning, minor changes, and a monthly performance report. Larger new builds are scoped separately.
- Are there platform costs on top?
- Yes, and we itemize them in the audit. Expect $50 to $400 per month for LLM usage, telephony, and hosting depending on volume. These are billed to your accounts, not marked up by us.
- Can we cancel?
- Retainers cancel with 30 days notice. You keep everything already built, in accounts you control.
- Do you offer payment plans?
- Builds over $10,000 are typically split across phase milestones, so payment tracks delivery.
Ready to simplify your business with AI automation?
Let's talk about how intelligent automation can save your team time, reduce errors, and help you focus on what actually drives your business forward.