How much does an AI employee cost?
A working AI employee costs $7,500 to $25,000 to build, plus $297 to $797 a month to run. Our flagship install is $15,000 plus $497 a month — roughly $1,017 a month all-in with approved financing. The office role it takes over costs $4,000 to $6,500 a month once payroll tax, insurance, PTO and turnover are counted. Below about $3,000, you are buying a chatbot, not an employee.
Almost nobody in this industry will put that on a website. You get “book a call to discuss pricing,” which is a polite way of saying the number changes depending on how much they think you can pay. We publish the whole ladder, so here is the honest version of what drives the range and what you actually get at each rung.
Why the range is so wide
The spread from $7,500 to $25,000 is not a negotiating window. It tracks three things that genuinely change the amount of work.
- How many workflows the role contains. Answering the phone is one workflow. An office admin who answers, books, chases invoices, files the daily report and updates the schedule is five, and each one has to be built, connected and tested against the others.
- How many systems it has to touch. A system that lives in one CRM is straightforward. A system that has to read a project-management tool, write to the accounting file and text a customer is three integrations, three sets of permissions, and three things that can break when a vendor ships an update.
- How much of your process is written down. This is the one people underestimate. If your scheduling rules, service area, price bands and escalation rules live in one person’s head, somebody has to get them out of that head before anything can be built. That discovery work is real hours, and it is why every serious build starts with a mapping week.
The published ladder
These are our prices, on our website, today. Take them to any other quote you get and ask what the difference buys.
| Rung | Build | Monthly | Financed, all-in* | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI Opportunity Audit | $1,000 | — | — | Diagnosis. Credited toward any install inside 60 days. |
| Launch Pad | $2,500 | $297 | — | Website, business number with missed-call text-back, CRM, booking calendar, review requests. |
| AI Assistant Install | $7,500 | $297 | ~$549 | Launch Pad plus one built AI capability aimed at one named leak. |
| AI Front Office | $12,500 | $597 | ~$1,030 | Website, phone, CRM and a 24/7 answer agent trained on your business, as one system. |
| AI Employee Install | $15,000 | $497 | ~$1,017 | One real role automated deeply inside the tools you already run. |
| AI Operations System | $25,000 | $797 | — | Two employee-grade roles, custom tooling you keep, and an owner’s dashboard. |
With approved credit. Financing provided by third-party lenders; terms, rates, and approval subject to lender review. Payment shown assumes 36-month term. Monthly service fee billed separately by AI Builders.
What the monthly fee actually pays for
The monthly number is the part most buyers skim, and it is the part that decides whether the system is still working in a year. Ours covers four things:
- The infrastructure it runs on — model usage, telephony minutes, the CRM seat, hosting. This is a genuine pass-through cost and it does not go away.
- Keeping it alive when platforms change. QuickBooks changes an API. A CRM renames a field. Your phone provider updates a setting. Something breaks roughly every quarter in any real integration, and somebody has to fix it before you notice.
- Tuning. A phone agent that has taken 400 real calls is better than one that has taken four, but only if someone reads the transcripts and adjusts it.
- A person who answers. When it does something odd on a Tuesday, you should be able to reach someone who knows your build.
If a vendor charges a monthly fee and none of that is happening, you are paying rent on software.
What is not in the price
Four things routinely surprise people, so we would rather say them here than in an invoice:
- Third-party subscriptions you already pay for. If your build sits on top of Buildertrend or QuickBooks, those stay your bill.
- Your team’s time during discovery. Expect a few hours from whoever actually does the job today. It is the highest-value time in the whole project.
- Cleaning up bad data. If nobody has touched the customer list in two years, a system pointed at it will surface every duplicate and every dead number. That is useful, and it is still work.
- Scope you add later. We build to a written scope you approve. Adding a sixth workflow after we have built five is a new project, priced as one.
What a cheap one costs you later
There is a large market of $99-a-month “AI employees.” Some of them are fine at exactly one thing. The failure pattern is consistent and worth knowing before you spend the $99.
A cheap agent does not know your service area, so it books a job ninety minutes outside it. It does not know your price bands, so it quotes something you would never quote. It does not write to your CRM, so the lead exists in a tool nobody opens. It has no approval gate, so the first time it is confidently wrong, it is wrong to a customer instead of to you. And because it was never wired into how you actually work, the person it was supposed to help ends up double-entering everything it touches.
The honest version: cheap tools are good at tasks. What costs $15,000 is the work of turning a pile of tasks into a role that can be held accountable.
Straight talk: when you should not spend this
If the process only exists in your head, fix that first. An AI employee amplifies your process. If every job runs a little differently and the answer to “how do we handle that” is “ask Dave,” you will pay us to discover that, which is a slow way to learn it.
If the leak is small, buy the small thing. If you are missing four calls a week, a $2,500 Launch Pad with missed-call text-back may recover most of it. We will tell you that at the audit rather than sell you a $15,000 build you do not need.
If cash is genuinely tight and the payment would hurt, wait. A system that stresses your cash position is not an asset, whatever it does for your calendar.
How to compare two quotes honestly
Price alone will not tell you which is better. Five questions will:
- What exactly gets built, in writing, before you start? A scope you approve, with a pass/fail checklist, or a vague promise?
- What does it connect to, and how? A native integration, a documented API, or a browser automation that breaks when a button moves?
- What can it do without a human? Anything that spends money, sends a legal document or writes to your books should require approval, and you should be able to see the log.
- Who owns it if you leave? Your accounts, your data, your automations — or theirs?
- What is the monthly fee actually buying? Ask for the breakdown. If they cannot give you one, it is margin.
Our own answers to all five are published on the services and pricing page, including what each rung includes in plain words.
Bring the role you would hire for next. We map your operation, rank your top five opportunities by return, and give you a written plan with real numbers — whether or not you build with us.
Book Your AI Opportunity Audit — $1,000, credited toward your build