Ethan+Pricing guide
How much does AI consulting cost? And what do AI agents cost to run?
What AI consultants charge, what an AI agent costs to build, and what it costs to run once it is live. The ranges you will see quoted and what moves the price.
Search for what AI consulting costs and you get two kinds of answer. Agencies that say "it depends" and never give a number, and listicles that average together a freelancer on a marketplace and a Big Four transformation program.
Here is a more useful version: what the ranges look like, what actually moves the price, and the cost nobody quotes you, which is running the thing once it is built.
Read the numbers as rough market ranges, not quotes. They are what you will commonly see in late 2026. Prices move, and the right number for you depends on your scope.
What AI consultants charge
| Type of engagement | What you get | Typical range you will see quoted |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly advice | Answers to specific questions, no build | About $150 to $400 an hour, more for specialists |
| Strategy sprint or assessment | A ranked plan of where AI should do work, and what has to exist first | Low five figures |
| One production agent | One process, built, tested and handed over | Low to mid five figures |
| A department running on agents | Several agents, plus approvals, cost tracking and records | Mid five figures to six figures |
| Large firm transformation program | Strategy, change management, integration at enterprise scale | Six to seven figures |
Two warnings about the low end. A cheap assessment that ends in a slide deck is not cheap if nobody executes it. And a cheap agent build that skips limits, approvals and records usually gets switched off, which makes it the most expensive option on the list.
What moves the price
Whether the process is written down. This is the biggest one. If the work exists only in people's heads, someone has to get it out, and that is most of the effort. A process that is already documented can be handed to an agent much faster.
Whether your systems are reachable. An agent that can act inside your tools through an API or MCP is straightforward. An agent that has to work around software that will not let it in is not.
How much it may do alone. An agent that drafts for a person to approve is simpler than one that sends, spends or changes things on its own. More authority means more care around limits and records.
How many agents, and whether they work together. One agent doing one job is a contained project. Several agents handing work to each other need coordination, a shared record, and someone accountable for each.
Whether your team can run it afterward. Training your people to maintain and change what was built costs something up front and saves you from paying a consultant forever.
What AI agents cost to run
This is the part most quotes leave out.
- Model usage. You pay for what the agent reads and writes. A short task can cost cents. A long autonomous build can cost dollars or more per run. Coding agents like Claude Code and Codex are mostly bundled into subscriptions with usage limits, which changes the math again.
- Tools and hosting. Whatever the agent needs to do its job: search, email, data, a place to run.
- Review time. A person who knows the work checks what the agent produces, especially early on. This is a real cost, and it shrinks as the agent proves itself.
- Failures. Agent work has a failure rate. Rework costs money, so a cheaper model that fails more can cost more.
The biggest lever on running cost is not finding a cheaper model. It is the shape of the workflow. In one long build I kept the expensive model on planning and review and gave implementation to a much cheaper one, and my usage of the expensive model dropped by roughly 95% without losing quality. The full numbers are in How I cut my Astra usage.
The other lever is being able to see the cost at all. Every company knows its labor cost per person and per project. Almost none know the equivalent for their agents, which means they cannot tell which agent work makes money. Cost per task, per agent and per client should be part of what gets built.
How I price
Every engagement I take has a fixed scope, a fixed price and written success criteria, and you own everything that gets built. I take a few a year, from a consulting sprint to a full build. See AI consulting and AI agents for business for what each includes.
When you get in touch, the form asks for a budget band, from under $10k to $50k and up. Tell me what you run and what you want to change, and I will tell you honestly what it would take.
Questions people ask
- How much does an AI consultant cost per hour?
- Independent AI consultants commonly quote somewhere between about $150 and $400 an hour, with specialists above that. Hourly pricing is a poor fit for this work, though. You want to pay for an outcome with written success criteria, not for time.
- How much does it cost to build an AI agent?
- A single agent for one well defined process is commonly quoted in the low to mid five figures. A set of agents running a department, with the approvals, cost tracking and records that make them trustworthy, is a larger project. The process being ready matters more to the price than the model does.
- How much does an AI agent cost to run per month?
- Model usage, any tools or hosting it needs, and the time a person spends reviewing its work. Usage can be a few cents per task or several dollars for long ones. The fastest way to cut it is to keep the expensive model on judgment and give the busy work to a cheaper one.
- Is AI consulting worth it for a small business?
- If there is a team and real revenue, often yes, because the savings compound every month the agents run. If you are a solo founder, you will usually get more from good open source tools and free training than from an engagement.
- How do you price your engagements?
- Fixed scope, fixed price, written success criteria. The contact form asks for a budget band, from under $10k to $50k and up, because the honest answer to what something costs starts with what it is worth to you.