What an AI agent costs a small business.
The three costs of an AI agent for a small business: build, run cost, and upkeep, with published Pilot, Install, and Operate prices as a worked example.
Most answers to this question quote a model's price per million tokens. That number is real, and it is the least useful one. A back-office agent has three costs, and the usage bill is rarely the one that decides the outcome. Building an agent is mostly not code. It is writing the rules the job follows, connecting the systems the agent needs, giving each login only the permissions the job requires, setting up the approval queue, and testing on real records until exceptions are handled. With me, the Pilot is $12,500 for one agent on one workflow, running on your real data within 30 days or a full refund. The fee is credited toward the Install, which is $40,000 for two to four agents, live in 30 to 45 days. Building in-house moves that cost to staff time. The same work still has to happen: the rules, the permissions, and the testing. The code is the smaller part. Running an agent means model usage, the accounts it works through, such as an email seat and app logins, and hosting. For document and record work, usage is often modest. A published Infinite Renewals breakdown priced six customer success workflows for one account manager at $162 to $667 a year in usage. In my installs, every account and run cost is registered in your company's name and bills to you directly, so the number is visible and yours to control. Vendors change their software, models are updated, and the business changes its rules. An agent nobody maintains drifts until people stop trusting it. Budget for upkeep from the start. My Operate plan is $4,500 a month after go-live. It includes $1,000 of run cost, monitoring, vendor and model changes, one new workflow per quarter, and a monthly report. Or your team takes it over with the runbook I deliver with every system. A private appliance runs the agent on a Mac in your office instead of the cloud. It is priced at hardware cost plus $5,000. Before pricing anything, measure the job: hours per week, items waiting, late fees, slow quotes, and mistakes caught after the fact. That baseline is what the agent has to beat, and it tells you whether the job is worth an agent at all. The free AI Value Scan measures one workflow and recommends a first agent, usable with any vendor, including me.