The straight answer most builders won't put on a page — with the honest math for deciding whether it's even worth it for your business.
Because "AI agent" describes three different products. When you collect quotes, you're really comparing tiers:
| Tier | Typical price | What you actually get |
|---|---|---|
| Single-bot shops | $3k–$15k | One chatbot or workflow. Usually no quality control, no human approval step, no maintenance plan — it decays quietly. |
| Boutique multi-agent builders | $10k–$50k | A coordinated team of specialized agents with shared memory and human oversight, custom-built to one business. This is our tier. |
| Enterprise AI firms | $150k+ | Department-scale systems for companies with procurement teams. Overkill below eight figures of revenue. |
A $3,000 quote and a $30,000 quote aren't the same purchase at different prices — they're different purchases. The questions that expose the difference: does a second system check the AI's work? Does anything send without a human's yes? Who maintains it when the models change?
The retainer isn't "keeping the lights on." AI systems that act on your behalf need to stay accurate, safe, and current in a field that changes monthly. Concretely: 24/7 monitoring and failure response · quality-control review of every outbound send · model updates and migrations as providers change · tuning against your real results · a monthly report counting what actually ran. Unmaintained AI degrades. Maintained AI compounds.
Ignore the hype in both directions and run the number:
Two more honesty checks when you're shopping: nobody can guarantee results (be wary of anyone who does), and you should own the system — your accounts, your data, everything it learns — with no lock-in.
We put a free calculator on one page — three sliders, no email required to see your figure. It uses the same capped, disclosed formula above.
Run your numbers →The ranges above are 2026 market research, not our rate card — we price each build from the buyer's own numbers, capped at half of first-year savings. Your exact figure comes from a free roadmap — yours to keep whether we work together or not.