What does an AI automation project actually cost?

Why is it so hard to get a straight number?

Search for what AI automation costs and most of what comes back is written by people selling something other than automation: course sellers, agency directories, and lead-generation sites. The pages that do come from agencies tend to follow a specific pattern, and it’s worth naming because you will recognize it once you’ve seen it.

The pattern is a pricing guide that publishes a range for the industry and no price for the author. One example we came across quotes $1,500–$8,000 as a typical band, then routes you to a discovery call without stating what the company itself charges. The page is optimized for the search, not for the answer.

So the honest starting point is: the numbers you can find are mostly not the vendors’ numbers.

What do the reported figures actually look like?

We keep teardowns on 17 named done-for-you AI automation agencies. Here is what the price picture across that set genuinely looks like, and where each figure comes from.

• One publishes a fixed price for a defined scope. Team 400 lists packages from $25K and custom builds at $50K–$250K. That is the vendor’s own number.
• One publishes hourly rates. Gearheart lists $40–$60/hr by role, against open-ended time and materials.
• For most of the rest, the only figures available come from directory listings, primarily Clutch. Reported minimums across the set run from around $1K to $50K. Reported typical project totals cluster in two bands: roughly $10K–$49K, and roughly $50K–$200K. Hourly rates reported range from $25 to $199.

Verified as of 2026-07-06, against 17 named competitors; Team 400 verified 2026-07-08. Pages change. If you are reading this long after those dates, treat the tally as a snapshot rather than a current fact.

The useful conclusion isn’t the spread. It’s that a Clutch estimate is a directory’s inference from past deals, not a commitment anyone made to you. When a vendor’s price only exists on a third-party site, the number you eventually get quoted is set after they have met you.

What actually drives the cost?

Five things, roughly in order of how much they move the number.

1. How many workflows, and how deep each one goes. One workflow with a clear trigger and a clear ending is a small piece of work. “Automate support” is not a scope, it’s a department. Most cost surprises start here, because the buyer and the vendor were describing different amounts of work with the same words.

2. How many systems it has to touch, and how well they behave. Two systems with clean, documented APIs is straightforward. Six systems, one of which is a legacy tool with no API and a CSV export, is a different project. Integration count drives cost more reliably than anything technical about the AI itself.

3. How clean your data is. This is the one buyers most often don’t price in. If the CRM has four spellings of the same company name and half the tickets are untagged, something has to fix that before an agent can be trusted to act on it. That work is real and it is often the largest single line in a build.

4. What guardrails the work requires. An agent that drafts a reply for a human to send is a much smaller security problem than an agent that issues refunds. Scoped access, audit logging, and approval gates on anything that costs money are not optional extras on the second kind, and they take time to design properly.

5. Who maintains it afterwards. A build designed to be handed over, with documentation someone else can pick up, costs more upfront than one that only the vendor understands. It costs dramatically less over two years. Where this lands in your quote is a choice the vendor made, whether or not they told you.

Notice that four of the five are about your environment, not the vendor’s technology. That’s why a number quoted before anyone has looked at your systems is a guess wearing a suit.

What does SimplyCubed charge?

Published, so you can compare it against whatever else you’re holding:

• AI Automation Audit: $1,500. We review your real workflows, stack, and security, and hand you a readiness heatmap, a prioritized fix list, and a build-ready blueprint you own. Credited in full toward a Sprint if you proceed within 30 days.
• AI Automation Sprint: $10K–$20K. Fixed for the scope, agreed in writing before work starts. Live in 2–5 weeks. Typically one to three agents, integrated into the tools you already run.
• Ongoing support: optional, from $1,000/mo. Added after you’ve seen results, not bundled to make the build look cheaper.

And the part that makes the number mean something: we agree your success metrics in writing before starting. If we don’t hit them within 30 days of deployment, we keep working at no extra cost until we do, or we refund 50%.

Fifty percent, not a hundred. We would rather publish the real term than let a softer phrase do the work.

Is $10K–$20K expensive?

Against the alternatives on the same job, here is the honest comparison.

Option	Cost	Time to value
Build it on Zapier, Make, or n8n	$12–$70/mo plus your team’s time	Days for simple, months for complex
Hire an automation engineer	~$120K/yr	3–6 months to recruit and ramp
Enterprise AI vendor	$50K+	~6 months
SimplyCubed Sprint	$10K–$20K fixed	2–5 weeks

If your workflows are simple and someone in-house will own them, the first row is the right answer and we’ll say so. The Sprint is priced for the case where the manual work is already costing more than the build, and where nobody on the team has a spare quarter to become an automation engineer.

How do you tell whether a quote is fair?

Not by comparing the number to an industry range, because the ranges published in this category are mostly marketing. Compare on shape:

• Is the price fixed for a scope written down somewhere, or an estimate against an hourly rate?
• Is there a success metric in writing before work starts?
• Who pays if it runs long?
• What do you own on day 31?

A $30K quote with all four answered is a better buy than a $12K quote with none of them, and it is frequently cheaper by the time it’s finished.

If you want the fair-price question answered against your actual systems rather than in general, that’s what the Audit is for. $1,500, and it comes off the Sprint if you go ahead.