Ask five AI consultants what a project costs and you will get five requests for a discovery call. That opacity is not accidental — it lets a firm price each client by what they seem able to pay. Here is what the market actually looks like, so you can walk into those calls informed.
The four ways this work gets priced
Hourly
Published 2026 benchmarks put independent and boutique AI consultants roughly in the $100–$350 per hour range, with large firms materially higher and offshore providers materially lower. Hourly works for advisory conversations. It is a poor structure for implementation, because it puts you and your consultant on opposite sides of every estimate.
Fixed-fee assessment
Readiness assessments for small and mid-sized businesses commonly run $2,000–$5,000 nationally, for two to three weeks of work ending in a written roadmap. Enterprise discovery engagements run an order of magnitude higher. This is usually the right first purchase: it is bounded, and the deliverable has value even if you never proceed.
Fixed-fee implementation
Pilot projects — one workflow, start to finish — commonly land at $5,000–$15,000 over two to six weeks. Full implementations for an SMB typically run $15,000–$50,000 over six to twelve weeks. The range is wide because scope varies enormously; what matters is that the fee is fixed against a written scope, with milestone billing.
Monthly retainer
Ongoing support and iteration for SMBs generally runs $2,000–$8,000 a month. Fractional AI leadership — senior oversight of a broader programme — runs higher, commonly quoted at $5,000–$15,000 a month at ten to twenty hours a week, though SMB engagements sit well below the top of that range.
What the Florida market actually charges
Firms in the Sarasota–Tampa corridor that publish prices — a small minority — cluster noticeably below national benchmarks. Published local figures we have seen include monthly automation retainers from roughly $500 to $5,000, one-time builds around $4,000 to $7,500, AI agent projects quoted from $6,000 to $40,000, and one-day on-site workshops around $5,000.
Read that gap carefully in both directions. It means you can get good work in this market without national-agency pricing. It also means an unusually cheap quote is common here rather than suspicious — you have to evaluate on substance rather than assuming price signals quality.
What is usually not in the quote
- API and model usage costs. Real but usually modest — from a few dollars to a few hundred a month for typical SMB volumes. Ask for an estimate based on your actual volumes.
- Software subscriptions. Automation platforms, vector databases, phone infrastructure. Ask whether these are billed to you directly or resold at a markup.
- Ongoing maintenance. Things break and models change. Ask what happens in month four.
- Your own team's time. Budget six to ten hours of staff time for an assessment and more during implementation. This is real cost.
Questions that separate honest quotes from expensive ones
- Who owns the code and configurations when we are done? The answer should be “you.” If it is “we host it on our platform,” understand what happens when you leave.
- What does it cost to run per month? A consultant who cannot estimate this has not thought the project through.
- What is the success metric and who defines it? Agree it in writing before work starts.
- Where does our data go, and can the vendor train on it? Vague answers here are a serious warning sign.
- Can you show me a named client doing something similar? “340% average ROI” with no named client is a number someone made up.
- What would you tell us not to automate? A consultant with no answer is selling, not advising.
A realistic first-year budget
For a 20-person Florida business getting seriously into this: an assessment, one implementation project, a team training session and a written policy will land somewhere in the low-to-mid five figures for the year, plus a few thousand in software and usage costs. That is a real number, not a small one, and it should be justified by hours saved that you can point to.
If the numbers do not work at that level, the honest advice is to start with training and a policy — a few thousand dollars that makes your existing team meaningfully more effective — and revisit implementation next year.
Our own rates are published on the pricing page. We think hiding them wastes everybody's time.