What AI help costs a small business

What drives the cost

• Seats: one paid plan per person who will use a tool.
• Usage: anything built on an AI model through its programming interface is billed by how much it is used, not per seat.
• Setup: the hours it takes someone to learn how your week runs and to wire AI into it.
• Upkeep: tools change, so something has to keep checking that the work still comes out right.
• Your own time: a few hours showing how the business runs, then quick reviews along the way.

What the vendors publish for seats

These are the vendors' own listed prices on the date shown. They change, so check the linked page before you decide.

• Claude Team, standard seat, for teams of 2 to 150: $20 per seat per month billed annually, or $25 billed monthly (Anthropic, checked 2026-10-17).
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Business, an add-on to a Microsoft 365 Business plan: listed at $18 per user per month paid yearly, marked down from $21 (Microsoft, checked 2026-10-17). It sits on top of the Microsoft 365 plan you already pay for.

Ten seats at $20 a month is $200 a month, or $2,400 a year. That is arithmetic on the vendor's list price, not a quote. A seat only pays for itself if the person uses it on real work.

How I price my own work

I do not publish my prices. Here is how the ladder works, so you know what you would be agreeing to.

• Discovery: free, 45 minutes. No pitch.
• Mapping: it ends with a written plan, ranked opportunities and a fixed-price quote for the first build. The plan is yours to keep either way.
• Calibration: a fixed price, quoted from the plan. Before I build, we write down the task, the hours it takes today and the target. Miss it and I fix it, or you get your money back.
• Acceleration: I train your team to run it, or optional extra support keeps it running.

The order of the four services is on the services page.

When you do not need paid help

If a tool you already pay for does the job, I will say so on the call and save you the build. A seat and an hour of your own time is often enough for email and documents.