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What it actually costs.
Numbers first. A scoped single-job automation: $5,000–$15,000. An AI agent wired into several of your systems with human-in-the-loop controls: $15,000–$40,000. Past that you're building a product, and the conversation is different.
For calibration from the wider market: offshore shops advertise $20–30/hour and quote $3,000 builds — you'll spend the savings on the rebuild. US agencies bill $150–300/hour with project minimums that start where our large projects end. A senior in-house AI engineer in the Bay Area runs $200,000+ a year before you've automated anything.
What moves the price
every system touched (CRM, books, inbox, phone) adds surface. One integration is a build; five is an architecture.
a system drafting internal summaries can be wrong occasionally; a system sending quotes to customers cannot. Verification layers, evals, and human-approval gates are where careful money goes.
clean structured data automates cheap. Photos of receipts and forwarded email chains automate less cheap. (This is also where modern LLMs earn their keep.)
the quiet multiplier nobody mentions. Software with a real API automates cleanly; software without one — or on the pricing tier that locks the API away — means driving a browser instead, which costs more to build, more to maintain, and breaks when the vendor redesigns a login page. Check your tools' API situation before you collect quotes; one plan upgrade sometimes saves thousands on the build.
The ongoing costs nobody quotes
Model API usage: for most small-business workloads, $20–200/month — design matters more than volume. Hosting: $0–50/month on modern platforms. Maintenance: from $500/month managed, and worth naming honestly — automations run against a moving world, and untended ones die in silence.
The walk-away signs: a quote with no maintenance line, a demo that can't be shown running for a real customer, and any pitch where "AI" appears more often than the name of your actual workflow. Ask every vendor the same question we invite you to ask us: show me something of yours running in production right now. Ours are under // live below. To turn these ranges into your number, run the cost calculator.
Common questions
A scoped single-job automation typically runs $5,000–$15,000. A multi-system AI agent with human-in-the-loop controls runs $15,000–$40,000. Larger than that is product development.
Model API usage of roughly $20–200/month for most small-business workloads, hosting of $0–50/month, and maintenance from about $500/month — automations degrade without tending as APIs and data sources change.
Offshore shops advertising $20–30/hour produce builds that commonly fail in production edge cases; the savings are usually spent on the rebuild. Price should track failure cost, integration count, and data quality.
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