What AI automation actually costs
Almost nobody in this industry publishes a number. Here is ours, what sits behind it, and what you should pay for the tools regardless of who you hire.
Search for what AI automation costs and you will find a lot of pages that discuss pricing without ever stating a price. There is a reason for that. Quoting after discovery lets an agency read the room, and a business doing $12M pays more than one doing $900K for work that is broadly the same.
We would rather you knew before the call. Here is what we charge.
Where that sits in the market
For context, published figures from other firms in this space put ongoing automation retainers in the $1,000 to $5,000 per month range, with custom workflow builds quoted at $5,000 to $25,000 per project and specialist hourly rates between $75 and $250. On the consulting side of the market, fractional AI leadership is commonly priced at $2,000 to $8,000 per month for eight to twenty hours, and small and mid-sized businesses are told to expect $10,000 to $50,000 for an initial project.
So the monthly number is not unusual. What differs is what you get for it, and whether the build stops when the retainer does.
What the monthly fee actually buys
Month one is not a discovery phase that bills you to produce a slide deck. Your base system goes live: a daily brief with suggested replies and reply classification running in your inbox, email labeling and cleanup, LinkedIn inbox triage, calendar management, meeting follow-up with summaries and action items and a drafted reply, and a document library of up to eight custom skills matched to your brand.
After that, we build one custom automation for your business every one to two months, chosen from your industry's catalogue. Full Stack runs a faster cadence with a priority queue.
Two definitions worth pinning down before you sign anything with anyone, because they are where scope disputes happen:
- A build is a new workflow.
- An enhancement is a change inside a workflow that already exists.
Enhancements are not builds. If a proposal is vague about that distinction, ask.
What is not in the price
This is the part that turns a $2,500 quote into a $2,900 invoice if nobody mentions it, so here it is up front. You pay for the platforms directly, on your own accounts and your own card.
| Tool | Roughly | Why it is yours |
|---|---|---|
| n8n | ~$50/mo | Your automation infrastructure. Every workflow we build stays live under your login when the engagement ends. |
| Claude | Usage-based | Your account and API key. Skills and flows run under your credentials, so nothing disappears when you move on. |
| Calendly | ~$12/mo | Booking links, intake forms and CRM triggers stay intact afterwards. |
| Netlify | ~$9/mo | Hosting for client-facing deliverables. Skipped entirely if you already have a host. |
| Your CRM | Existing plan | We automate what you already pay for rather than migrating you. |
| Enrichment / skip-trace APIs | Usage-billed | Only in prospecting flows, billed to your card rather than bundled and marked up. |
Call it roughly $70 a month in fixed platform cost, plus whatever your Claude usage and any enrichment APIs come to.
The reason it is structured this way: everything runs on your accounts, not ours. That is deliberate. If you leave, the automations keep running. An agency that hosts your workflows on its own infrastructure is selling you a subscription you cannot exit without losing the work.
Why there is a six-month minimum
Because a system that has been running for six weeks has not yet proven anything. The base system goes live in month one, but the compounding value is in the custom builds that follow, and those arrive one every month or two. A three-month engagement gets you the base system and one build, which is not enough to judge the work by.
The 30-day exit window exists for the opposite reason. If it is not a fit, you should find that out in the first month and be able to leave.
What moves the number
Honestly, less than you would expect. The tiers are the tiers. What varies is which builds make sense, and that depends almost entirely on the software you already run. Some CRMs and property management systems have clean APIs; some have none and require workarounds that cost more to build and break more often.
We confirm what is actually possible during setup, before anything is promised. If a workflow you want is not buildable against your stack, you get told that during scoping rather than discovering it in month three.
How to evaluate any AI automation quote
- Who owns the accounts? If the workflows run on the vendor's infrastructure, you are renting, not building. Ask what happens to the work when you cancel.
- What counts as a build versus an enhancement? Get it in writing. This is the single most common source of scope disagreement.
- What are the platform costs, and who is billed? A retainer that quietly excludes $300/mo in API usage is not the number you were quoted.
- Are enrichment APIs marked up? Pass-through at cost is normal. A margin on usage-based APIs is worth knowing about.
- What ships in month one? If the answer is a discovery document, you are paying a retainer for a report.
- Has the vendor run this in their own business? Ask which of the workflows they are selling you they use themselves, daily.
- What is the exit? A minimum term is reasonable. A minimum term with no early exit window is not.
Who this is priced for
Small businesses where relationships close deals and manual admin is the gap between capacity and revenue: business brokers, real estate agents and teams, CPAs and financial advisors, property managers, commercial brokers, lenders.
The common thread is not industry, it is that the bottleneck is a person doing repetitive work that a system should be doing, and that person is usually the owner.
If you are below roughly $500K in revenue, a $2,500 monthly retainer is probably not the right first move, and we will say so on the call rather than sell you into it.
The discovery call is free and 30 minutes. We audit your current workflow and identify the two or three places where automation moves the most revenue. If there is nothing there, we tell you.
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