How much does an AI consultant cost?

How the market structures its fees

There are four shapes and everything else is a variation on them. Hourly or per-session, a fixed fee for a defined piece of work, a monthly retainer, or a full programme with a team on it. The shape tells you more about what you are buying than the number does.

Hourly is the cheapest way to buy a specific decision and the worst way to buy a plan, because you end up watching the clock instead of thinking. Fixed fees suit anything with a defined deliverable, like an assessment or a roadmap. Retainers suit execution, when the questions arrive weekly and waiting a month for advice costs more than the retainer does. Programs are for organisations with procurement departments.

Ranges below are the shape of the market as I see it, not a survey. Treat them as the ballpark you should expect, and ask any consultant to explain where they sit in it and why.

What actually drives the price

Who is buying. The single biggest factor, and it has nothing to do with the work. The same two hours of thinking is priced differently for a sole trader and a listed company, because one has a procurement process and a risk register and the other has a phone.

How many people are on it. A firm sending four consultants to interview twelve staff over three weeks is selling something genuinely bigger than a single advisor. Whether you need the bigger thing is a separate question, and the honest answer for most businesses under a hundred staff is no.

Whether they also build. Consultancies attached to a delivery arm often price advice low, sometimes at nothing, because the advice is a route to the build. That is not automatically bad, but you are not buying independent advice and you should price it accordingly.

Depth of hands-on experience. There is a real difference between someone who reads about these tools and someone who uses them every day, and it shows up in the specificity of the advice. Generic advice is expensive at any price because you have to go and work out the details yourself anyway.

Whether anything is written down. A conversation you have to reconstruct from memory a week later is worth a fraction of the same conversation with a written plan attached. When you compare two quotes, compare the artefacts, not the hours.

What I charge, and exactly what is in it

AI Consulting is A$1,195 per month + GST, with a call each fortnight, clarity on what to build in Claude or ChatGPT and practical guidance on how to do it. No lock-in.

Custom development is A$150/hour + GST, with a separate project scope, estimated hours and terms before work starts.

We agree the work, estimated hours and engagement terms before starting.

Red flags when you are comparing quotes

The deliverable is not named. If a proposal describes a process but never says what lands in your inbox at the end, you are buying meetings. Ask what the artefact is and who writes it.

The advice always ends at their build. Ask directly whether they make money if you implement the recommendation. There is nothing wrong with a builder who builds, but you should know which conversation you are in.

Nobody will name the tools. A recommendation that stops at a category is unfinished. You should get named products, a reason for each, and what you would be paying per month for them.

The person selling is not the person doing. Common with larger firms. Ask who does the actual work and how many hours of it are theirs.

The scope is a word like transformation. Big words, no first step. Any proposal worth its fee can tell you what happens in week one.

The price moves with your revenue. If the number changes once they find out your turnover, the number was never about the work.

One last note on value. The point of paying for advice is not the hour, it is the thing you do not spend. A build that never should have been commissioned costs many times a session fee, and so does a year of a team quietly not using the tools you bought them. Judge the price against the mistake it prevents.