Pricing
What this actually costs.
Almost nobody in this field publishes rates, which makes it impossible to budget and easy to waste everyone's time. Here are mine. Australian dollars, excluding GST.
Project work
What a build actually costs.
Discovery is deliberately separate and it comes first. Charging for it keeps it honest: you get a usable process map either way, and if the map shows the process should not be automated, you have spent the smaller number to find that out.
How the mapping works-
Discovery
Your process mapped including the exceptions, the decision rules written down, and an agreed measure of what better means. Yours to keep whether or not you build anything with me afterwards.
Comes off the build if you proceed.
$3,000 – $6,000 fixed price, standalone
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One AI agent, in production
Built, connected to the systems it needs, tested against your real cases rather than tidy demo ones, boundaries configured, your team shown how to use it, and someone named as responsible for it.
A proof of concept is a fraction of this, and worth roughly what you would expect.
$10,000 – $20,000 per agent
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Each additional connected system
A knowledge base, a payment step, a CRM, a scheduling system. Each one is its own set of edge cases and its own way of failing, which is where the number moves.
from $6,000 per integration
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Multi-process programmes
Several processes, several systems, staged over months. Priced after discovery, because quoting this without a map is guessing.
$30,000 and up scoped per engagement
Ongoing support
Anything running in production needs an owner.
Automations sit between systems you do not control. Tools change their interfaces, your prices change, a supplier changes a file format. A system nobody maintains becomes a system nobody trusts, usually within a year. Monthly, minimum twelve months alongside a build.
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Essential
$900/month
up to 2 hours of work included
- Monitoring and alerting
- Break-fix when something stops
- Quarterly review of accuracy and drift
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Standard
$1,600/month
up to 4 hours of work included
- Everything in Essential
- Prompt and knowledge-base updates as your business changes
- Small changes and additions
- Next business day response
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Priority
$2,800/month
up to 8 hours of work included
- Everything in Standard
- Ongoing optimisation against your measures
- A monthly working session
- Same business day response
Unused hours do not roll over. Work beyond the included hours is billed at $500 an hour.
Fit
Who this isn't for.
Worth saying plainly, because it saves us both a call.
If you want two apps connected for a few hundred dollars, that is a legitimate need and I am the wrong person for it. Zapier and Make will do it, their own templates are good, and a generalist freelancer will charge appropriately. Paying consultancy rates for that is a waste of your money.
If you want to try something and see how it goes, with no defined process and no agreed measure of what better looks like, we will both be disappointed. That is not caution about the technology. It is the single most reliable predictor of an automation project failing, and I have written about why that happens.
The work I do well is the kind where the process is genuinely yours, several systems have to agree with each other, and getting it wrong has a cost.
Not sure which of these you need?
Describe the process and I will tell you which band it falls in, or tell you honestly if it should not be automated at all. That answer is free and it is often the useful one.