Four things went up on my feed this week, and read together they are one argument: you can work out what an AI automation is worth to you before anybody sends you a quote. Here is the whole of it in one place.
Start with arithmetic, not a demo
The first number is not the price. It is what the job costs you now.
Take the task you are thinking of automating. How many hours a week does it take, and what is an hour of that person's time actually worth? Multiply to get the weekly cost, then multiply by your working weeks per year for the annual cost. That annual figure is the cost of doing nothing, and it is the only number that tells you whether any quote is reasonable.
A single automation here is $495 flat and takes about a week. If the task eats two hours a week, the arithmetic is quick and it is not close. If the task takes ten minutes a week, do not automate it. I would rather say that on a call than take the money — a build that saves ten minutes a week is a thing you paid for and then stopped thinking about.
Most jobs people bring me fail this test. That is a normal outcome, not a wasted conversation.
Then ask four questions
Once a quote is in front of you, four questions separate a scoped price from a guessed one. They work on me and they work on anyone else you are talking to.
How many automations is that? "AI for your business" is not a unit. One workflow is a unit.
Which tools, and whose account do they run in? This is the one people skip and regret. Here, the accounts are yours. I do not resell anybody's software or take a cut of it, so the subscriptions are in your name and stay there.
What counts as finished? If nobody has written down what "done" looks like, the project cannot end, and an open-ended project is how an hourly rate grows.
Who can switch it off? If the answer is "call us," you have bought a dependency rather than a tool.
The published prices behind those answers are on the site and have not moved: $495 for one workflow. $1,500 either for two or three that hand off to each other, or for a website chatbot, which carries a platform fee of about $50 a month. Support afterwards is $295 a month and you can cancel it. Larger or unusual projects get a custom flat quote after the free consult, always agreed before work begins.
Get a number without talking to anyone
You do not have to book a call to find out what this would cost. There is a five-question planner on the site that asks its structured questions in your browser. Tell it what the business is called and what is eating your week, and it comes back with a named automation, an illustrative capacity estimate, and what I would charge to build it.
You can see the plan without an email address. Business lookup and usage requests may be sent while you use the advisor; your address is only shared if you enter it to request follow-up. You can read the plan, close the tab, and build the thing yourself — that is a real option and I have written it down so it stays one. The assumptions behind the number are on the screen rather than buried, so you can check the arithmetic instead of trusting it.
The cost nobody quotes
There is one more cost, and it does not appear on any quote in this market: whether the thing is still running a year from now.
The automations that die are not the ones that break. They are the ones nobody can explain. Six months in, the person who asked for it has moved on, and whoever is left does not know what it touches or how to switch it off. So they stop trusting it, and then they stop using it. Nothing failed. It quietly went unused, and the money went with it.
That is why everything I build comes with a one-page description of what it touches and how to switch it off. Write down what it does and who checks it. It is not paperwork for its own sake — it is the difference between an automation and an expense.
The same logic says to go slowly. Build one, live with it for a month, and see whether anybody still uses it. If they do, build the next one. If they do not, that is worth knowing before you have bought five.
If you want the fifteen minutes
It is free, there is no card, and you leave with one thing worth doing whether or not you hire anybody. Bring one repetitive task. If it is not worth building yet, you will hear that instead — that is most of this job.