AI consulting for small business: what it costs and when it's worth it
Most AI consulting is priced and written for companies with a thousand employees. This page is about what it looks like for a business with five to fifty: what you'd actually buy, what it costs, and when the honest answer is that you don't need it yet.
$1,500, fixed. One week. You keep the findings whether or not you hire us.
- Official Make Technical Partner
- Airtable
- n8n
- OpenAI
- Close CRM
- GoHighLevel
- Shopify
What small businesses actually buy
Not strategy decks. In practice it's four things:
- Getting your tools to talk to each other. The CRM, the invoicing, the spreadsheet everyone actually uses. This is the least exciting and most valuable.
- Handling the inbox and the pipeline. Qualifying enquiries, routing them, drafting first replies for a human to approve. We automated our own lead qualification and it removed most of a working day each week.
- Getting data out of documents. Invoices, contracts, forms, PDFs from suppliers who will never send you an API. This is where AI genuinely outperforms the old approach.
- Reporting that builds itself. The numbers you currently assemble by hand every Monday.
When you shouldn't hire anyone
You don't need a consultant if the manual work adds up to under a few hours a month, if your process is still changing weekly, or if the thing you want automated is a decision rather than a task. Automating a bad process makes it worse, faster.
You also don't need one if a single off-the-shelf tool solves it. We'll point you at one if that's the answer.
What it costs
Three ranges, honestly:
Automation audit
start hereA week of work. You get a map of your manual processes, a costed list of what's worth automating, and an estimate of hours saved. The fee comes off the build if you go ahead. Most small businesses should start here.
Build projects
One or two workflows, live and handed over. Payback is usually within a quarter if the audit picked the right target.
Ongoing support
Optional. Worth it once you have enough automation that a breakage would hurt.
What you should be suspicious of: anyone quoting a six-figure "AI transformation" to a twenty-person company, anyone who won't give a number before a discovery call, and anyone whose proposal doesn't say what happens when it breaks.
What this looks like in practice
Wholesale Universe came to us onboarding every new client by hand: lead in the CRM, contract drafted manually, details re-typed into three systems. We rebuilt it so a closed deal generates its own pre-filled contract, notifies the team on signature, and writes itself back into the CRM. Invoicing and product uploads followed. Around a thousand hours in six months, returned.
At 200 people, they're not a small business. But the processes we fixed are the same ones a ten-person company has, just repeated more often.
Related: business process automation, custom AI solutions and the automation audit
Related case studies
- case-study / our own pipeline
How we automated our own lead qualification with n8n and GPT-4
Every inbound lead qualified against clear rules, with the reasoning recorded and a first message drafted. 25+ hours a week back for our sales work.
25+ hours a weekn8n, OpenAI GPT-4, Google Sheets
Common questions
How much does an AI consultant cost for a small business?
An audit runs $1,500 and comes off the build price; a first build is typically $8,000–$15,000. Published industry benchmarks put full implementations at $15,000–$75,000, so treat anything under ten thousand as a scoped pilot rather than a whole system.
Is my business too small for AI?
Probably not, but it might be too small to need a consultant. If you're under a few hours of manual work a month, do it yourself.
What's the difference between AI consulting and automation consulting?
Less than the marketing suggests. Most of the value in both is connecting systems and removing manual steps. AI is one of the tools, useful where the work involves language or unstructured documents.
Do I need to replace my existing software?
Almost never. We build on what you already pay for.
Start with the audit
One week, fixed price, no commitment to anything after it. You get a map of your manual work, a costed list of what's worth automating, and an honest note about what isn't. The fee comes off the build if you go ahead.