What should AI automation cost, and how do you know if you’re being overcharged?

Short answer

A single automation is worth $500 to $3,000. One capability wired across your systems is $7,500 to $12,500. A full role is $15,000 to $25,000. Monthly fees of $297 to $797 are normal; above about $1,500 a month there should be a named human doing work. You are being overcharged when the price scales with your revenue instead of with the build.

There is no published rate card in this industry, which is exactly why the spread on the same job can be 5x. Here is how to price the work from the outside, using the only thing that actually drives cost: how much has to be built, connected and maintained.

Four tiers of work, and what each is honestly worth

Tier	What it is	Fair build price	Fair monthly
1. A single automation	One trigger, one action. A form submission creates a CRM record. A finished job fires a review request.	$500–$3,000	$0–$99
2. A connected capability	One job done end-to-end across two or three systems — a voice agent that answers, qualifies and books; a follow-up engine that works the whole stale-quote list.	$7,500–$12,500	$297–$597
3. A role	Three to five connected workflows that together do the core of a job someone would otherwise hold.	$15,000–$25,000	$497–$797
4. Custom software	A tool that does not exist yet, built for how your company works, and yours to keep.	$25,000+	Depends on what it runs on

Two notes on reading that table. Anything in tier 1 that is quoted at tier 2 prices is being sold as “AI” when it is a Zapier-class automation with a nicer name. And anything in tier 3 quoted at tier 1 prices is not going to be connected to anything — you will get a demo, not a system.

What you are actually paying for

Strip away the branding and a build is three costs:

Discovery hours. Getting the process out of somebody’s head and onto paper. On a real role this is 8 to 20 hours and it is the part that decides whether the rest works.
Integration risk. Connecting to a documented API is predictable. Connecting to a platform with no API, or one that changes quarterly, is not — and whoever prices that job is pricing the risk of fixing it repeatedly.
Ongoing survival. A system with three integrations will break something roughly every quarter, because platforms ship changes. Somebody either maintains it or it quietly stops working and nobody notices for six weeks.

Notice what is not on that list: the model. Raw model usage for a typical small-business workload costs a few dollars to a few tens of dollars a month. Anyone pricing on “AI compute” is telling you a story.

Six pricing patterns that mean you are being overcharged

The price moves when they learn your revenue. The build does not get harder because you did $9M instead of $3M. Value-based pricing is a legitimate model, but it should be disclosed, not discovered.
No written scope before you pay. If nobody will put in writing what gets built and how you will know it works, the number is arbitrary and so is the finish line.
A large monthly with no breakdown. Ask what portion is infrastructure, what is maintenance, and what is human time. A vendor who cannot separate those three is quoting margin.
Per-seat pricing on something with no seats. A phone agent does not care how many employees you have.
“Setup fee” with a long contract and an early-termination penalty. The penalty exists because they expect you to want out.
They own the accounts. If the CRM, the phone number and the automations live in their tenant, you are renting your own operation and the switching cost is the real price.

Four things that justify a higher price

A discovery phase you can see. A process map of your business, delivered as a document, before anything is built.
A pass/fail checklist you approve. Written acceptance criteria mean the vendor is willing to be measured.
An approval gate and an audit log. Anything that spends money, sends a legal document or writes to your books should require a human yes, and every action should be recoverable after the fact.
Domain knowledge you would otherwise pay for twice. Someone who already knows what a draw schedule is, or how lien deadlines work, will not bill you to learn it.

Build or subscribe?

Subscribe when the job is generic: scheduling, e-signature, review requests, basic missed-call text-back. There is good, cheap software for all of it and building your own is vanity.

Build when the value is in the connection between systems, or when the rules are yours — your service area, your price bands, your escalation rules, your contract language. Nobody sells that off the shelf, and a generic tool that does not know those rules produces confident, wrong answers to your customers.

The usual right answer is both: subscribe to the commodity layer, build the connective tissue and the judgment on top of it. That is what our Launch Pad rung is — the commodity foundation, priced like a commodity, before anything bespoke gets built.

Straight talk: when cheap is the right call

If your problem is that you miss a handful of calls a week, buy missed-call text-back and a booking link and stop there. That is a few hundred dollars and it will recover most of it. We will tell you that at the audit and we have told people that at the audit.

If you are pre-revenue or your process changes every month, do not build anything yet. You will pay to automate a process you are about to abandon.

And if a $500 tool solves 80% of it, the remaining 20% is rarely worth $15,000 — unless that 20% is where the money leaks, which is the whole point of running the numbers before you buy.

What we charge, and why it is on the website

Every rung of our ladder is published with its build price, its monthly, and its financed payment: $1,000 for the audit, $2,500 for Launch Pad, $7,500 for an assistant, $12,500 for a front office, $15,000 for an employee-grade role, $25,000 for an operations system. A vendor who will not put price on the website is telling you something about how the number gets decided.

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