What an AI readiness assessment costs for a small business

If you’ve gone looking for this number you’ve probably noticed the problem: almost nobody will tell you. Consultancies publish long articles about the value of an assessment and then ask you to book a call to find out what it costs.

So here are the actual ranges, what moves them, and what you should walk away with. Our own price is at the bottom.

The published ranges

These are the numbers that show up when firms do put them in writing, as of August 2026:

What you’re buying	Typical range
A narrow assessment for a small business	$2,000 to $8,000
A comprehensive small business assessment, one to two weeks	around $2,500
A full mid-market audit	$5,000 to $15,000
Enterprise-grade assessment	$15,000 to $50,000 and up
A first AI build project, after the assessment	$10,000 to $50,000

Entry-level ongoing consulting retainers tend to start around $5,000 a month, which is a different shape of commitment and worth keeping separate in your head.

If you run a business with twenty people, the first two rows are your range. Anything quoting you the fourth row is selling to a company that isn’t yours.

What actually moves the price

Four things, roughly in order of impact.

How many people we need to talk to. The assessment is mostly interviews. One owner who knows everything is quick. Six department heads who each own part of a process is not.

How many systems are involved. Looking at one workflow inside one system is straightforward. Tracing a job that starts in email, lives in a spreadsheet, and ends in your accounting package takes longer, because most of the work is finding where the data actually is.

Whether the data is in any shape to use. This is the one that surprises people. A serious chunk of assessment time goes into whether the information a tool would need is accurate, current, and reachable. Often that answer is the most valuable thing in the report, and occasionally it’s the whole report.

Whether you want a written deliverable or a conversation. A real document that you can hand to a partner or a bank costs more to produce than an hour on a call. Both are legitimate. Just know which one you’re buying.

What you should get for the money

Push back if you don’t get these.

• A short list of specific candidates, described in your language. “Automate the quoting handoff” is a candidate. “Implement intelligent document processing” is a slide.
• A number attached to each one: hours saved per week, or dollars, or errors avoided. If nobody will estimate the value, nobody has really assessed anything.
• A cost to build each one, so you can compare the value against the price without paying for a second engagement to find out.
• The list of things that were ruled out, and why. This is usually the longer list, and it’s how you tell whether someone actually looked.
• An honest read on your data, including the case where it isn’t ready and fixing it comes first.
• The document itself, to keep, whether or not you hire the firm that wrote it.

Two things that should make you suspicious

A free assessment with no scope. Someone is paying for that time, and if it isn’t you, the assessment’s job is to produce a proposal rather than an answer. That’s a sales call with a document attached. There’s nothing wrong with a genuinely free short conversation, but be clear which one you’re being offered.

A quote that arrives before anyone has asked how you work. If a firm can price your assessment without knowing how many systems or people are involved, they’re quoting a template.

Is it worth paying for at all

Sometimes not, and it’s worth saying so plainly.

If you already know exactly which job you want automated, and it lives in one system, you’re better off asking two or three firms to quote that build directly. The assessment is for when you don’t yet know where to point, which is the common case and nothing to be embarrassed about.

It’s also worth remembering the backdrop. Roughly four in five companies using AI can’t point to a measurable return on it. The point of an assessment is to not join them, so an assessment that doesn’t attach numbers to its recommendations has failed at the only job that mattered.

What we charge

Ours is $2,500, flat, and it takes one to two weeks.

If you hire us for the build work within 90 days, the whole $2,500 comes off that invoice. So a project that goes ahead costs you nothing net for the assessment, and someone who’s still deciding has still paid for our real time. That’s the only way we can afford to do it properly rather than treating it as a sales call.

You get the written document either way, including the parts where we tell you something isn’t worth building.

If that sounds like the right starting point, the AI enablement page covers what happens after the assessment, and what we do when the honest answer turns out to be a plain automation with no AI in it.