What Should AI Actually Cost an SMB?

"What does this cost?" is the question most AI vendors dodge the longest. That's usually a bad sign — it means the price depends on how much they think you'll pay, not on the actual scope of work. Here's a straighter answer.

Why "it depends" is still true — just not vaguely

Cost genuinely does depend on scope. A single automated workflow is a fundamentally different project than an integrated multi-department system. The honest move isn't to hide that behind "contact us" — it's to publish the tiers and let you see where your need actually lands.

A rough map

A readiness assessment (figuring out where to start) should cost a few hundred to about a thousand euros, take a few days, and produce a concrete recommendation — not a sales pitch in disguise.

A single, well-defined workflow — a chatbot, a lead-qualification flow, a document-extraction pipeline — is typically a few thousand euros as a fixed project fee, delivered in a matter of weeks. If someone quotes you tens of thousands for one narrow workflow, ask exactly what's driving that number.

Connecting multiple workflows into one system costs more — realistically into five figures — because it involves integration work, not just one model call wired to one form.

Ongoing management (someone watching what's live, tuning it, adding new workflows as needs change) is usually a monthly retainer, not a per-project fee, because the work itself is ongoing.

The real cost driver most people miss

The line-item that surprises people isn't implementation — it's the ongoing API usage cost for whatever LLM is doing the work. For a single well-scoped workflow at SMB volume, this is usually a modest monthly amount, not a hidden enterprise bill. Ask any vendor to be specific about this before you sign anything — if they can't give you a number, that's worth noticing.

What "too cheap" and "too expensive" both signal

Free or near-free "AI automation" from an unknown vendor usually means your data is the product, or the workflow is a thin wrapper that will break the first time a real edge case hits it. A quote in the tens of thousands for a single narrow workflow usually means you're paying for a sales process, not engineering time.

See our actual numbers

We publish indicative pricing for exactly this reason — see the Services page for the current ranges across the audit and all three tiers. And since a stage-appropriate, honest price is part of the pitch here, not a footnote: this is worth reading before you compare against anyone quoting a black-box number.