What does an AI consultant cost a small business?

Short answer: for an owner-operated business, plan on $600 for a written audit and $500 to $5,000 for a first project, with the audit credited toward that project if it starts within 60 days. A first year with an audit and three projects runs about $1,500 to $15,000. Every price is quoted in writing before work starts.

The rest of this post shows where those numbers come from, what moves them up or down, and how to tell whether any quote you get, from us or from anyone else, is fair.

Two terms first

An AI consultant is a person who looks at how your business runs, finds the work that eats the most hours, and sets up AI tools to take some of it over. The tools are ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot, plus whatever they can connect to in your business: email, documents, the calendar, the CRM. The consultant's job is the connecting, the testing, and the training, because the software itself is the cheap part.

A fixed fee is a price agreed in writing before the work begins. A cap is a ceiling on a quote: the bill can come in under it, never over it. Every project price below is one or the other. If a consultant will not give you one of those two things, there is a section on that further down.

What we charge

These are our prices as of October 2026. The services page has each one in more detail.

• Free consult. Online, or in person if you are near Portland. We talk through your business and point you in a direction, which is often enough to run with on your own. If you would rather have help, we write up a statement of work.
• Website review, $150. Your key pages checked by hand, with a written report on what is broken and what to fix first. Credited toward the audit if you book it within 60 days.
• Search and AI visibility baseline, $250. Where you show up in Google and in AI answers today, and the five changes to make first. The 90-day program is $500 and adds two rechecks.
• Paid AI audit, $600. A short questionnaire, a working session, and a written report with three ranked opportunities and a recommendation for what to tackle first. Credited in full toward your first project if it starts within 60 days.
• Projects, $500 to $5,000. Every project gets a written quote with a cap before work starts. Most land in this range. No retainer, no long-term contract, no minimum project size.
• Private AI setup, $600 to $1,500. Open-weight models on hardware you own, for firms whose files cannot leave the building. You buy any hardware directly. We do not mark it up.
• Ongoing advisory, $600 a month minimum. Someone on call as tools change and questions come up. Three-month commitment, then month to month.
• AI training. Live, hands-on one-hour sessions for your team, quoted per series.
• AI strategy and policy. For nonprofits, schools, and organizations with a board to answer to. A fixed fee, quoted in writing, based on the size of the organization and what the work covers.

Search plans and flat-fee ad management have their own prices, on the pricing page.

What a first project actually comes to

The audit ranks three opportunities, and the first project is usually the one at the top of that list.

Here is a real project, with the client's details removed: a scheduling automation that pulls bookings from a Google Sheet into a calendar and sends confirmation emails. Build, testing, one round of revisions, a training session, and a short written runbook. The written quote: $2,000. It saves the front desk about four hours a week.

That is a fair picture of the middle of the range. A smaller first project, such as a drafting setup for the emails your team sends every day, sits near the bottom, and a project that ties several tools together sits near the top.

So a first year looks like this:

• An audit at $600, credited toward the first project
• One to three projects, most $500 to $5,000 each
• Advisory only if you want someone on call, at $600 a month

Three projects come to about $1,500 to $15,000. For a business doing $500,000 to $5 million a year, that is a fraction of one salary. Whether it pays off comes down to one question: does the work actually cut repeat hours? The audit exists so you know the answer before you spend the larger amount.

What moves a quote up or down

Up:

• Regulated work. Law, finance, and healthcare need enterprise-tier accounts and a written policy on what data goes where. That adds setup time.
• Older systems. Connecting AI to a modern stack (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, HubSpot) is quick. Custom or legacy software takes longer.
• Headcount to train. Twenty people need more sessions than two.

Down:

• One workflow, one tool, one outcome. Easy to scope, easy to price.
• Someone inside who owns it. A point person who handles the small questions after handoff saves hours on both sides.

How this compares

The guides Google quotes for this question describe a different tier of the market. Iternal, one of the three guides Google draws on, puts advisory at $100 to $300 an hour. The AI Consulting Network, in a guide updated in July 2026, puts a readiness assessment at $2,000 to $8,000, a strategy roadmap at $8,000 to $25,000, and a pilot implementation of one or two use cases at $15,000 to $50,000, and says most small businesses spend $10,000 to $50,000 on an initial project. First Movers publishes its own prices: $15,000 for a two-month done-with-you engagement and $40,000 for a done-for-you build. Those numbers buy a team and a multi-week program.

Our prices sit a tier below that on purpose. A $600 audit in place of a $2,000 to $8,000 assessment, and projects at $500 to $5,000 in place of $15,000 and up, because one workflow at a time is how an owner-operated business absorbs change. In our experience a short written audit from an independent practice runs $300 to $1,500, so $600 sits toward the low end of that range, and all of it comes off your first project.

So the question to settle before you hire anyone is whether you are buying a team and a program, or a person and a project. Both are legitimate. They are priced for different businesses.

Three questions settle whether any quote is fair:

1. Is it in writing, with a cap? If the price can grow on you, it will.
2. Does the consultant take software commissions? If so, the tool they recommend is the one that pays them, not the one that fits.
3. Does the proposal say what done looks like? A vague deliverable has a vague price.

How much does the AI itself cost?

Less than most owners expect. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini each run about $20 a month per person on an individual plan and $20 to $25 a seat on a team plan with proper privacy controls. Most small businesses that settle on two tools land at $40 to $50 per person per month. Our comparison of the three has the detail.

Usage costs are smaller still: when we measured one three-day build of a working CRM, the AI usage came to $285, and most of that was the model re-reading the conversation. The receipt is here.

The larger cost is time: setting a tool up on a real workflow, testing it, and getting the people who will use it comfortable with it. That is what a consultant's fee buys.

What is the best AI agent for a small business?

An AI agent is software that takes a multi-step job and runs it without someone prompting each step: read the intake form, pull the matching file, draft the reply, put it in the queue for review.

There is no single best one, and we would be wary of anyone who names one before asking about your business. The best agent for a small business is the one built on the workflow that eats the most hours each week, using the tools your team already has open. For most owner-operators that means one narrow agent done well, with a person reviewing its output, before any general-purpose agent gets a look.

Two questions tell you where to start. Which task do you or your staff do the same way every week? Could someone else on the team run it from written steps? If the answer to the second is yes, that task is a candidate.

What to do with this

If you want a number for your own business, book a free consult. You will leave with a read on what to do first, whether or not you hire us. No pitch.