AI Operations (FDE) insight

How much do AI automation agencies charge? Real prices from 9 firms

Hayat Amin · Updated 2026-10-15

AI automation agencies charge about $150 to $250 an hour, $1,000 to $15,000 for a fixed start, or $1,000 to $30,000 a month on retainer. Here are the prices nine firms publish, read on 15 October 2026, and the costs that never make the quote.

AI automation agencies in the United States charge in three ways: by the hour, at about $150 to $250, by the project, from roughly $1,000 for a single setup to $15,000 for a design sprint, or by the month, from $1,000 for a light retainer up to $15,000 to $30,000 for a fully managed service. The software they build on is extra and usually cheap.

Hayat Amin spent twenty years as a technology CFO and sold three companies, so he's read a lot of supplier invoices and knows which line on a quote is the one that grows. He now builds AI operations inside companies himself, and the prices below are what we'd want an owner to see before signing anything. Every figure was read on the agency's own page on 15 October 2026, unless we say otherwise.

the three ways agencies price

Hourly is the simplest to compare and the easiest to overspend on. You buy a block of hours, the agency works through it, and you top up. It suits one or two small automations and a team that knows what it wants.

A fixed project means you pay for an outcome: a discovery sprint, a set of workflows built and handed over. It suits a company that can describe the job in a page. Watch what happens after handover, because most fixed projects end the day the build ends.

A monthly retainer pays for a set amount of time or for keeping things running. It suits a company with more than five automations live, because every one of them will break at some point when a supplier changes a form or a field gets renamed.

what nine firms publish

We picked firms that print a price or a minimum on their own site or on Zapier's partner directory, plus one large firm that doesn't, so you can see the difference. All are US based or sell into the US.

XRAY: $250 an hour, or a $15,000 sprint

XRAY prints a flat $250 an hour, sold as 4 hours for $1,000, 10 for $2,500 or 20 for $5,000. Its Workflow Solution Design Sprint is $15,000, and larger work is "disclosed after assessment". It's a good fit if you want to see the rate before the first call, and the wrong fit if you need one $300 fix.

Connex Digital: $250 an hour

Connex Digital's ZoomFlow page states a standard rate of $250 an hour, bought as a package of hours. Same rate as XRAY, so the comparison comes down to who has built your kind of workflow before.

n8n Lab: $1,000 setup to $30,000 a month

n8n Lab prints the widest range we found. A cloud setup is $1,000 and a self hosted setup $1,500, both one off, with 30 or 60 days of support. À la carte work starts at $150 an hour, and its automation as a service runs $15,000 to $30,000 a month. That top tier is a team, not a contractor, and a 20 person company doesn't need it.

McBride Method: $1,500 assessment, $5,000 build

McBride Method charges $1,500 for an assessment, credited in full if you go on to a build, and says that if it can't find you at least 5 hours a week, you pay nothing. A 1:1 executive build is $5,000. Retainers are $1,000 or $2,000 a month, 10% off with a 12 month prepay, on 30 days' notice. That guarantee is the clearest promise we read anywhere.

Leanware: $5,000 to $15,000 to start

Leanware is a custom software firm that builds AI agents. Its Sprint 0 is a fixed $5,000 to $15,000 over 2 to 4 weeks. Support starts at $1,682 a month for 42 hours, which is about $40 an hour on our arithmetic, with 30 days' notice. A dedicated engineer is from about $6,000 a month, with a six month minimum. That's the cheapest hourly figure here, and it buys engineering time, not someone who'll work out what to automate.

GetUWired: $500 minimum

GetUWired, in Dahlonega, Georgia, doesn't print a rate. Zapier's partner directory lists it as Platinum with 282 reviews at 5.0 and a minimum spend of $500.

MercOlogy: $200 minimum

MercOlogy, in Lake Odessa, Michigan, is Platinum on Zapier's directory with 438 reviews at 5.0, a minimum spend of $200 and project budgets listed from $100 to $250. It was the lowest minimum we found.

Brainforge: no published price

Brainforge's pricing page says it uses fixed pricing "when the work is repeatable and bounded" and custom pricing otherwise. It prints no figure. That's normal for firms selling to larger data and operations teams, and it means you won't know the cost until the proposal lands.

Beyond Elevation: $3,000 audit, projects from $30k

This is our firm, so read it as disclosure, not ranking. Our forward deployed engineering page prints a $3,000 fixed audit over two weeks inside your business, projects from $30k over 8 to 14 weeks, and fractional work from $5,800 a month, 1 to 2 days a week, stop any time. You own the code, agents, accounts and docs. We sit above the small automation shops on price because Hayat Amin builds the whole operations layer, including the dashboard the owner runs on, rather than a handful of Zaps.

what one pricing guide says

Taskip, which sells software to agencies, updated its pricing guide on 14 October 2026. It puts small business work at $1,500 to $5,000 one off plus $500 to $1,500 a month, mid market at $5,000 to $20,000 plus $1,500 to $4,000 a month, and enterprise at $20,000 to $100,000 and up plus $3,000 to $8,000 a month. It doesn't cite a survey for those ranges, so treat them as one writer's view. They do line up with the published prices above.

The costs that aren't on the quote

The software is billed to you, not the agency. Zapier's free plan gives 100 tasks a month, Professional is $19.99 a month on annual billing for 750 tasks, or $29.99 monthly, and Team starts at $69 a month annually for 2,000 tasks. AI model fees sit on top, billed by the model provider. We go through those line by line in how much AI automation costs.

Maintenance is the line that grows. Ask what it costs when a workflow breaks in month seven. Ask where the accounts sit, too. If the automations live in the agency's Zapier or n8n account, under their keys, you're renting them, and leaving costs you a rebuild.

Is it worth paying an agency?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median pay for general office clerks at $21.64 an hour in May 2025. If an automation takes 5 hours a week of retyping off one person, which is our assumption and not a measured figure, that's about $108 a week, or $5,626 a year, on our arithmetic. A 20 hour block at $250 an hour costs $5,000. One well chosen workflow pays for a small agency job inside a year, and a badly chosen one never does. We wrote more on that in is AI automation worth it.

Before you ask for quotes, list the jobs your team does more than once a week that involve copying data from one system to another, with the hours next to each. Our guide to how to automate your business walks through it. An agency quoting against that list will give you a price you can compare. One quoting against "we want AI" will give you a number it can't defend.

Beyond Elevation's part in this

Beyond Elevation is Hayat Amin's firm, and we work with owners of companies of 10 to 200 people in New York City, across the United States and in London. If you need two Zaps, hire one of the smaller shops above and save the money. If your accounting, CRM, orders and inbox don't talk to each other and nobody can see the numbers until month end, that's the work we do, and Hayat Amin builds it himself inside your own accounts. The build conversation starts at meethayat.com/services/fde.

About Hayat Amin

Hayat Amin has spent twenty years in technology, most of them as a chief financial officer. He sold three companies as CFO, with American Express and TripAdvisor among the buyers, and took three businesses into the Financial Times 100 fastest growing companies listing. He's sat beside founders from the first conversation to the wire transfer on an exit, and he's paid enough supplier invoices to know which quotes hold up.

That's why Hayat Amin is exceptional at this work. He's a CFO turned forward deployed engineer, so he scopes the automation against the numbers the owner needs, then builds it: connecting systems that don't talk to each other and putting a real time dashboard in front of the chief executive. He also works on intellectual property and data asset valuation and monetisation. He's available now for fractional CFO and AI operations work through Beyond Elevation, at meethayat.com/services/fde, and for the finance seat at meethayat.com/cfo.

If you want a straight answer on which of your processes are worth paying anyone to automate, we do a free audit: one call, then a written list of what to automate first, what it saves and what it costs, at beyondelevation.com/call/audit.

Frequently asked questions

How much do AI automation agencies charge?

Of the firms we read on 15 October 2026, hourly rates ran from $150 (n8n Lab) to $250 (XRAY and Connex Digital), fixed starts from $1,000 to $15,000, and retainers from $1,000 a month to $15,000 to $30,000 a month for a managed service.

How much does an AI automation agency cost per month?

McBride Method prints retainers of $1,000 and $2,000 a month. Leanware's support starts at $1,682 a month for 42 hours. n8n Lab's managed service is $15,000 to $30,000 a month.

How much to charge for AI automation?

If you're the one selling it, the published market sits at $150 to $250 an hour for agencies, with Zapier partner minimums as low as $200. Price against the hours you save the client, not the hours you spend.

How much does it cost to build an AI system?

At the low end, n8n Lab's one off cloud setup is $1,000. A custom build with discovery runs $5,000 to $15,000 to start at Leanware, and $15,000 for XRAY's design sprint.

How much do AI automation agencies make?

We couldn't find a published, sourced figure for agency revenue or profit, so we won't guess one. The prices above are what they charge, not what they keep.

Is an AI automation agency worth it?

For a job taking 5 or more hours a week, usually. On median office clerk pay of $21.64 an hour, 5 hours a week is about $5,626 a year on our arithmetic, against a 20 hour agency block of $5,000.