Pricing
Pricing: the assessment, the build, and the managed plan
Three numbers, published. One-time work is quoted as a fixed fee before it starts. The only recurring cost is the managed plan, and you choose whether to keep it. No platform fee, no hourly consulting rate, and you own everything we build. Third-party costs and on-site days are quoted separately and stated in your proposal. Prices verified September 2026.
One-time and recurring
The three things you can buy
- One-time
AI Readiness Assessment
$10,000
Two days at your operation with your leadership team and the people who do the work. Every candidate initiative scored by P&L impact and risk. You leave with a ranked roadmap you keep, a business case for the first initiative, a systems and access review, and a fixed-scope proposal for the first build. The fee is credited once against that build. Larger operations with more sites or systems are quoted before we book.
- One-time · fixed fee
Build workstreams
from $10,000each
An agent, an integration, or a reporting build, scoped and quoted before work starts. The build fee is quoted in the proposal, not published, because it depends on four things: the number of systems touched, the quality of your data, the number of integrations, and on-site days. The first build is one eligible workflow with written acceptance tests; if it misses them, its fee is waived, and you keep it either way.
- Recurring
Managed AI
from $1,200per month
We run what we build. Two plans, twelve-month term, billed monthly.
| Plan | Managed (recommended) | Premium |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $1,200 | $2,200 |
| Included engineering hours / month | 5 | 10 |
| Monitoring | Proactive monitoring and alerting | Proactive monitoring and alerting |
| Priority-one response target | 4 business hours | 4 hours, including after-hours on-call |
| Break/fix for vendor API and portal changes | From included hours | From included hours |
| Infrastructure, security patches, vendor coordination | ✓ | ✓ |
| Restoration | From included hours, then at the plan rate with your approval | From included hours, then at the plan rate with your approval |
| Work beyond included hours | $200 / hr, pre-approved | $200 / hr, pre-approved |
A response target is the time to a person acknowledging and starting on a priority-one issue; restoration follows from included hours. Unused hours roll over one month. Third-party fees (cloud hosting, data providers) are contracted by you and are not in the plan. Fees adjust at renewal by 5 percent or CPI, whichever is greater.
The credit
How the credit works
The assessment fee is credited once, against your first build. If your first engagement is quoted at $40,000 including the assessment, you pay $10,000 for the assessment and $30,000 for the build. It is not $50,000, and the credit does not apply again to a later build.
- The credit expires twelve months after the assessment.
- A first build quoted below $10,000 uses the credit up; the remainder is not refunded.
- Travel and third-party fees (cloud hosting, data providers) sit outside the credit.
- If the assessment finds nothing worth building, you keep the ranked roadmap and the governance notes, and the fee has paid for those deliverables. The assessment fee is not refunded.
- The deliverables are written so another implementer could act on them.
One example
- AI Readiness Assessment
- $10,000
- First build, as quoted
- $40,000
- Assessment credit
- − $10,000
- Build invoice
- $30,000
What moves a workstream's price
Systems touched. One system with a good API is the low end. Four systems, one of them without an API, is the high end.
Data quality. Clean, consistent records mean the build is mostly plumbing. Duplicates, free-text fields, and years of inconsistent entry mean a cleanup step first.
Integrations and judgment. A rules-based integration is cheaper than an agent that has to read documents and decide. Both are cheaper than an agent that does both across several systems.
On-site days. Remote build work is standard. On-site days for training, shadowing, or change management are quoted separately.
We tell you which of these apply to your workstream, and the number, before you approve anything.
What is the AI consultant hourly rate, and why we don't bill one
People search for the AI consultant hourly rate because it is the number they expect a consultancy to lead with. We do not publish one, because we do not bill one for building. Hourly billing is fine for advice. It is the wrong model for building software, because the longer the build takes, the more the consultant earns, and you cannot budget a number that is not known until the end.
What we do instead: the assessment is a fixed fee, from $10,000. Every build is a fixed fee, from $10,000, quoted before work starts and sized by the systems touched, the quality of your data, and the number of integrations. The only hourly figure in our pricing is the pre-approved overage rate on a managed plan, $200 an hour, for work beyond the included hours.
A fixed fee changes three things. You approve a number before work starts. The risk of a slow build is ours, not yours. And the scope is written down, so "done" means the same thing to both of us.
The guarantee
The first build has acceptance tests in writing before we start. If it misses them, the build fee is waived; the assessment fee stands. You keep the code, the data, and the accounts either way. The first build is one eligible workflow touching up to three systems, with access, test data, and an internal owner in place before the clock starts. We can offer this because the assessment tells us, before we build, whether the use case is worth building.
Frequently asked questions
It is credited, not refunded. If you go on to build with us, the $10,000 comes off the first workstream, within twelve months. If you do not, you keep the ranked roadmap and the governance notes, which are written so any competent engineer could act on them.
One workflow, touching up to three systems, with API access or usable exports, test data, and a named owner on your side. Anything larger is quoted as its own workstream, and the credit applies to it the same way.
One scoped outcome: an agent, an integration, or a report, with the systems named, the success criteria written, a shadow period before it replaces the manual process, documentation, and handoff of code and accounts. Most clients do one at a time.
If you already know exactly what you want built and it is well defined, sometimes. Most of the time the assessment changes what gets built first, which is why we credit it rather than waive it.
The managed plan renews for twelve months unless either side declines with 30 days' notice. You can upgrade any time and downgrade at renewal. If you leave, everything transfers and we provide up to 15 days of transition help at the hourly rate.
Ask. For some workstreams we can split the build fee across the build and the first months of the managed plan; terms are set in the statement of work.