Search for what AI consulting costs and you will find a great deal of writing that never arrives at a number. Pages of "it depends," a paragraph about bespoke value, and a contact form. The reason is not mystery. It is that a published price makes you comparable, and most firms would rather find out what you can afford first.
We would rather answer the question, because the alternative wastes both our time. So:
Deeper consulting and solution builds start at $1,000. The first call, and the written report that comes out of it, cost nothing.
That is the floor, not the average. What follows is what actually moves the number — which is the more useful thing to know, whoever you end up hiring.
Why the first part is free
Not as a discount, and not as a trick to get you on a call. It is free because neither of us can price the work honestly until we know where your money is going. A firm that quotes you before that is quoting a guess, and guesses are padded.
So the first step is a call and a written report: what your process costs today, where it leaks, and what closing each leak would be worth. Plenty of owners take that report and fix things themselves. That is a genuinely fine outcome — it costs us a few hours and it costs you nothing, and we would rather that than sell a build nobody needed. You can read a full example of one before deciding whether it is worth your half hour.
What actually drives the price
Four things, in roughly the order they matter:
1. How many systems it has to touch. A build that lives in one place is straightforward. A build that has to read your calendar, write to your CRM, and text a technician is three integrations, and integrations are where software projects actually spend their money. This is the single biggest swing factor.
2. The state of your data.Not whether it is beautiful — nobody's is — but whether it exists and is reachable. If quotes live in one person's email and jobs live on a whiteboard, some of the work is getting them somewhere a system can see. Worth knowing that this is normal, not a disqualification.
3. How much judgment it needs. An agent that answers a known question from a known price list is a much smaller job than one making calls with money attached. The second needs guardrails, review steps, and a human in the loop — and should.
4. Whether anyone will maintain it. A system nobody watches quietly stops working. We include the reporting and the upkeep in the build rather than selling it back to you later, which raises the build price and lowers the total.
How to tell if a quote is fair
Whoever you are talking to, three questions separate a real proposal from a hopeful one:
"Which number is this supposed to move?"If the answer is a capability rather than a metric — "it will modernise your intake" — the proposal has no way of being judged, which means it has no way of failing. Be wary of work that cannot fail.
"What is that number today?"If nobody measured the before, there is no after. This is the mechanism behind the widely-quoted finding that most enterprise AI pilots show no measurable P&L impact — often not because they did nothing, but because nobody instrumented them. We pulled that apart in everyone is quoting the 95% stat wrong.
"What happens when it gets something wrong?" Every system built on a model will occasionally be wrong. A serious answer describes escalation, confidence thresholds, and who sees what before it reaches a customer. An answer of "it is very accurate" means nobody has thought about it.
When you should not hire anyone
Three cases where we would tell you to keep your money, and any honest firm should:
You are pre-revenue. Automation multiplies a process. If you do not have customers yet, there is nothing to multiply — go and get some first.
An off-the-shelf tool already does it. If your problem is scheduling and a cheap off-the-shelf scheduling product solves it, buy the product. Custom work earns its keep when your process is genuinely yours, not when you have a common problem.
The leak is smaller than the fix. If the thing costing you two hours a month takes a month to automate, the arithmetic does not work. This is exactly what the free report is for — it tells you the size of the problem before anyone quotes you for solving it.
If you want that arithmetic done on your business, that part costs nothing: start with the first call.