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?
By size, 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. This is often 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 the error handling and a person who gets the alert when it fails. The price is set before the work starts, 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 the volume of work the automations do. n8n can run on a server you rent, where you pay for the server instead. Their price pages spell out 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 these seats, I built a vision system and later cut its AI bill by 70 percent. The build was paid for once. The running bill comes every month, so it gets the same attention.
What does a real 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 is 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. A broken process run by a robot is a broken process that runs faster.
When should I not pay for a build?
When the tools you already own can do it. 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.