Hello ClarenceNote
How much should AI consulting cost in Australia?
The AI consulting industry is very good at not telling you the price. Here is ours, next to everyone else's, so you can judge it.
The range, without the hedging
At the top, the big consultancies and enterprise integrators start around $200,000 for an engagement and go well past a million. That is not a knock on them — it is a different product for a different buyer. If your business turns over under a couple of million, that product is not built for you and the number is not negotiable.
In the middle, there are agencies and freelancers quoting project work somewhere between a few thousand and a few tens of thousands. It depends entirely on scope, which is why nobody will give you a number on the phone.
At the bottom, there is the course-and-community world: $97, $497, $2,000 to sit in a cohort. You leave with a library of tactics and the same business you walked in with, minus the fee. This is the tier that most small businesses actually buy, and it is the one least likely to change anything.
Why nobody gives you a straight number
Not because the number is secretly huge. Because the work is genuinely hard to scope before anyone has looked at your business, and a consultant who quotes blind is either guessing or about to bill you for the guessing.
So the honest structure is not a project quote. It is: a free look at the problem, a small paid step to do one real thing, and only then a larger number if it is worth it. If a consultant will not show you the small step, that is a signal.
What we charge
Our entry point is $199. It includes two 30-minute sessions and access to the full material library, and it is valid for 12 months. The idea is that you pay for a small, concrete piece of help rather than a transformation programme you will never finish.
Beyond that, additional sessions are $150 an hour. That is the whole price list. No discovery retainer, no annual platform fee, no percentage of savings. If the work you need is more than a couple of sessions, we will tell you what it will cost before you start, and we will tell you if you should not bother.
We also give away a lot of it: the playbooks are free to download and run, no account needed. You can test whether our thinking is any good before you pay us anything. Most consultancies will not let you do that.
How to decide whether it is worth it
Price on its own tells you nothing. The question is what an hour of your time is worth, and how many of those hours a fix gives back. If a tradie spends four hours a week writing quotes and a change gets it to one, the maths on a $199 entry is easy.
If you cannot name the job you want removed, no amount of consulting fixes that, at any price. That is the one thing worth working out before you talk to anyone — including us.