How much does an AI consultant cost? Real numbers.

Small business AI consulting engagements generally run somewhere between $3,000 and $25,000 for a focused project. Hourly rates in the market run from around $100 to $400 an hour. Enterprise firms charge $100,000 and up for the same category of work, dressed up in more slides.

That's the market. The spread is huge because "AI consultant" can mean anything from a marketer reselling chatbot subscriptions to an engineer who builds you working software.

If you remember one thing from this post, make it this... the price matters less than what you're actually buying. A $5,000 engagement that ships a working system is cheap. A $2,000 strategy document you can't act on is expensive.

We're an AI consulting firm in Wilkes-Barre, so yes, we have a horse in this race. But we're going to give you the honest numbers anyway, including when you shouldn't hire anyone at all.

Free to a few hundred dollars. Discovery calls, checklists, self-serve resources. Most consultants offer a free first call. Take advantage of these before spending anything. Our AI readiness checklist is free and covers what a lot of paid "assessments" cover.

$1,000 to $5,000. A focused assessment or a small build. Somebody looks at one workflow, tells you what to fix, and in the better engagements actually fixes it. One automation, one integration, one bottleneck removed.

$5,000 to $25,000. A real project. Custom software, a CRM built around how you actually work, automation across several workflows. At this level you should be getting working systems, not documents. If someone quotes you $20,000 and the deliverable is a "roadmap"... walk.

$25,000 and up. This is enterprise territory. Multi-location businesses, regulated industries, complex data problems. A typical small business in NEPA should almost never need to spend this much. Anyone quoting a 10-person business six figures is pricing for a Fortune 500 and hoping you don't know better.

To tell you the truth, plenty of businesses don't need to hire anyone.

If your problem is "I want to write emails faster" or "I want help drafting social posts"... you need a $20 a month ChatGPT or Claude subscription and a few hours of practice. Not a consultant.

If you're curious what AI could do for your business but nothing is actively bleeding money, start with free resources. The Greater Scranton Chamber runs AI events now. Penn's Northeast published a free AI guide for small organizations. Read those first.

You need actual help when one of these is true.

You can name the workflow that's costing you money, but you can't build the fix yourself.

Your tools don't talk to each other and someone is retyping data between systems every day.

You're losing leads or jobs because of speed... missed calls, slow quotes, follow-ups that never happen.

You've already tried the off-the-shelf tools and they don't fit how your business runs.

If none of those apply yet, save your money. If one of them does, the math usually works out fast, because the problem is already costing you more than the fix.

We've watched local businesses get burned. Same patterns every time.

The deliverable is a document. Strategy decks feel valuable and change nothing. Ask one question before signing anything: "at the end of this, what will be running in my business that isn't running today?" If the answer is a plan, a roadmap, or a framework... that's a document.

They can't build. A lot of people selling AI services are salespeople with an offshore team behind the curtain, or no team at all. Ask who actually writes the code. Ask to see something they built running live. Builders love showing their work. Resellers change the subject.

Monthly fees with no ending. Some tools genuinely need ongoing costs, that's fair. But if the whole engagement is designed so you can never leave... the platform is proprietary, the logins aren't yours, nothing transfers... you're renting, not buying. You should own what you pay for.

Guaranteed results before they've seen your business. Nobody can promise you specific numbers without knowing how your business runs. Confidence is fine. Guarantees before discovery are a sales tactic.

Every project is priced on scope. We don't publish a rate card because a one-workflow automation and a full custom platform are not the same job, and pretending they cost the same would be dishonest in one direction or the other.

What we can tell you. The first conversation is free... 30 minutes, no pitch. We'll ask how your business runs, figure out what the problem is actually costing you, and tell you straight whether it's worth fixing. Sometimes the answer is "buy a $30 a month tool and skip us." We've said that to people. They tend to come back later with the bigger problem.

And when we do build, we build it ourselves, embedded in your business. No offshore handoffs. You own the result.

Don't start with "what does a consultant cost." Start with "what is the problem costing me."

A contractor missing five calls a week, where one in five would have booked a $400 job... that's around $20,000 a year walking away. An office manager spending three hours a day retyping data between systems... at $20 an hour that's about $15,000 a year on typing.

Against numbers like that, a few thousand dollars for a permanent fix isn't an expense. It's the cheapest employee you'll ever hire.

If you can't put a number on the problem yet, that's fine. That's what the first call is for. We'll help you find the number, and if it's too small to justify the work, we'll tell you.

Let's talk and see how your business runs. Call 570-258-8157 or book a time here.