An AI automation costs two things: the build and the running bill. I put a fixed price on the build before I start, or work at $150 an hour, and I estimate the monthly running bill in the same document.
How much does an AI automation project cost?
From smallest to biggest:
- Turn on what you already pay for, 90 minutes, $450. Most businesses have AI switched off inside their email, spreadsheets, and accounting software. Often this is the whole first win.
- Find the right thing to automate, one day, $3,500. The applied AI workshop. The team ranks where the hours go, and you leave with the list.
- Build one workflow, fixed price. One process, start to finish, with error handling and a named person who gets the alert when it fails. Priced once I have seen the process.
- Build a system of workflows, fixed price or $150 an hour. Several processes that hand work to each other, plus monitoring. Quoted the same way, after a look at every process in it.
Over $3,000, you can pay by the month while the work runs, no interest.
What does it cost to run every month?
Three lines on the bill:
- The automation platform. Zapier and Make charge by how much work the automations do. n8n can run on a server you rent, where you pay for the server instead. Their price pages list the tiers.
- The AI usage. Each call to a model costs a little. It adds up when a workflow runs thousands of times a month.
- Somebody watching it. Automations break when a vendor changes a screen or a field. Somebody has to get the alert and fix it.
Before my current fractional seats, I built a vision system and later cut its AI bill by 70 percent. You pay for the build once and the running bill every month, so I watch both.
What does a working one look like?
At Quartz Importers MN, where I hold the fractional CTO seat, a small sales team runs on 49 automated workflows every day. They have logged 39,645 production executions at a 0.2 percent failure rate.
What makes an automation cost more than expected?
- Messy data. If the same customer is spelled four ways in three systems, cleaning that up becomes part of the job.
- No owner. If nobody on staff knows what the automation is supposed to do, every question comes back to the builder at $150 an hour.
- Automating a bad process. Hand a broken process to a robot and you get the same mess, faster.
When should I not pay for a build?
When the tools you already own can do it, so check that first. The AI build page says what I build and what I tell people to buy instead, and custom AI versus off-the-shelf tools covers how to decide. If you already know the process you want automated, describe it on the start form and I will tell you whether it is a $450 fix or a build.
Answered by Jared Lukes, Minneapolis. Twenty-five years in brand, UX, and technology, currently holding fractional AI and technology seats at three companies. About Jared.