What an AI audit actually costs a small business

The short answer

Published pricing guides put an AI audit for a small business between $1,500 and $5,000 depending on size and scope. Ours is $2,500 flat and takes about two weeks, and the first three clients pay $1,000 because we are building our public case-study bench and say so out loud.

The number matters less than what it buys. An audit that ends in a slide deck about AI strategy was a sales call with homework. An audit worth paying for ends in a map of your actual work with dollars attached to it.

What you should get for the money

Three things, and we would hold any provider to this list, including us.

• A written inventory of the repeatable work in your business, task by task, from quoting to follow-up to the report someone assembles by hand every Friday
• A dollar figure on each item, built from the hours it eats now, so you can rank what is worth automating and ignore what is not
• Something working before the report lands. We implement one quick win during the audit itself, because a recommendation you can watch running is worth ten you have to imagine

Pricing shapes to be careful with

Free audits exist, and some are honest lead generation. Just know what they are. A free audit is priced to be recovered later, and the recommendations tend to point at whatever the provider wanted to sell you anyway.

Open-ended hourly discovery is the other shape to watch. If nobody will name a fixed price for looking at your business, the looking has a way of never finishing. We think discovery is exactly the thing a fixed price is for. You are buying an answer, not renting a consultant.

Questions worth asking any provider

These five sort the field quickly, whoever you talk to.

• Is the price fixed, and what exactly do I hold at the end?
• Will anything be working before the report arrives?
• Are the savings estimates in hours and dollars, or in adjectives?
• Who owns the accounts and everything you build afterward?
• Can I see something you run yourself, live, right now?