The hard part of buying AI automation in Denver isn't the price. It's that nobody will tell you the price.
You book a discovery call, then another, then another, and slowly learn that most of those firms were never in your range. A price sheet would have told you before the first one.
So here's ours. Every number in this post is published on our site, written as the full range we charge. Read it, and you'll know whether a conversation with us is worth your time.
Why nobody publishes prices, and why we do
Agencies keep pricing off their sites for two reasons, and only one of them is honest.
The honest one is that scope varies. An automation that connects two clean systems and one that untangles years of spreadsheet habits can sound identical in a first conversation. A firm that posts one number will be wrong for plenty of buyers.
The less honest one is anchoring. Quote a big number to a stranger and they leave. Quote it after an hour of friendly discovery and they negotiate.
We publish anyway. If our price is wrong for you, we'd both rather find out before the call. A number that scares someone off saves everyone an afternoon.
The three ways this gets priced
Almost every quote you'll see uses one of three models. They're good at different things.
Hourly. Common with solo consultants. It works for advisory work, where you're buying judgment in small doses. It's bad for builds, because the incentive runs the wrong direction. The longer the job takes, the more they earn, and you're holding an open tab with no total.
Fixed project price. Scope gets written down and locked before work starts, and the number doesn't move unless the scope does. This is how we price every build, and it's the right model for anything with a finish line.
Monthly retainer. Right for maintenance. Wrong as a way to pay off a build in installments. Watch for the retainer with no written scope. That's a subscription to someone's availability, and if you can't say what you get each month, you aren't buying anything.
What it actually costs, by what you're trying to do
Don't shop by service name. Shop by the problem you want gone. Here's what each kind of job runs with us.
| What you want | What it's called | What it runs |
|---|---|---|
| Figure out what's worth automating | An audit | $1,000 to $2,500 |
| Automate one specific thing | A single build | $1,500 to $3,500 |
| Replace a whole manual process | A workflow build | $5,500 to $12,000 |
| Get leads in and sorted automatically | A pipeline | $3,500 to $7,500 |
| Answer the phone | A voice agent | From $1,000, plus $500/mo and usage |
| Pull data you can't buy | A custom scraper | $1,500 to $3,000 |
| Keep all of it running | Managed services | $250 to $4,000+/mo |
Figure out what's worth automating
The audit takes one to two weeks. We look at how work actually moves through your business, rank the opportunities by what they'd save or earn, and lock the scope for your first build. It's for owners who know something should be automated and can't yet say what.
Automate one specific thing
A single build takes one to two weeks and solves one named problem: intake that gets retyped, quotes that sit in drafts, a report someone assembles by hand every Friday. For most small businesses it's the right first purchase, because it proves the idea before you spend real money.
Replace a whole manual process
A workflow build runs four to six weeks and rebuilds a process end to end, across every tool it touches. It's for businesses that already know where the hours go and are tired of paying people to copy data between screens.
Get leads in and sorted automatically
A pipeline takes three to four weeks and covers lead sourcing, enrichment, personalized outreach, and the handoff into your CRM. It's for teams that close well once a lead reaches them and simply don't see enough of them.
Answer the phone
A voice agent takes one to two weeks to build. It starts at $1,000, then $500 a month plus usage, because a phone agent costs something every time it picks up. It's for service businesses losing calls during busy hours and after close, and we wrote up what an AI voice agent should and shouldn't do on your phone in its own post.
Pull data you can't buy
A custom scraper takes one to two weeks and turns a public source into a scheduled feed. Think permit filings, competitor pricing, or listings no vendor packages. It's for businesses whose edge depends on information nobody sells in a clean form.
Keep all of it running
Managed plans are monthly. Care runs $250 to $500 a month, Operate runs $750 to $1,500, and Embedded runs $2,000+ to $4,000+ with weekly sessions and a fractional AI lead on your team. It's for anyone who has something live and would rather not find out it broke from a customer.
If you'd rather have all of it sequenced into one program, the Growth System runs 90 days and $12,000 to $30,000. Websites are their own category. Ours start at $1,000 plus a care plan from $150 a month, and we broke down what a website costs across the Denver market separately.
What moves the number
Every range above has a low end and a high end for a reason. These are the variables that push a project from one toward the other.
How many systems have to talk to each other. Connecting a form to a CRM is routine. Connecting your CRM, your scheduler, your accounting tool, and the spreadsheet nobody admits to owning is a different project.
Whether your data is clean. Duplicate customers, free-text fields, every possible spelling of the same street. Messy records are the hidden cost in almost every build, and they're cheaper to fix before automation than after.
Whether the source has a real API. A documented API is straightforward plumbing. Working around a tool that doesn't have one takes longer and breaks more often.
How many judgment calls the system has to make. The happy path is quick. Edge cases are most of the work: the customer who replies to the wrong thread, the order with a missing field, the lead that turns out to be a vendor.
Whether anyone maintains it afterward. A system built for someone to own looks different from one that gets handed over and forgotten.
If you want to see what those variables look like on real work, our case studies walk through the systems behind these numbers.
The line item nobody quotes
Maintenance.
Automations drift. Your pricing changes. A vendor retires an endpoint. Someone renames a form field. The system keeps running on yesterday's rules, confidently, until a customer notices before you do.
Most quotes end at launch. Your business doesn't stop changing at launch.
Budget for the month after, or you'll own a confidently wrong system. It's the reason we run managed AI services that monitor and fix what we build, and why we'd tell you to cut a feature before we'd tell you to cut the upkeep.
Five things that should make you walk
Any one of these on a quote is reason enough to leave the table.
- A quote before anyone looked at your systems. Feasibility is the whole question in automation, and nobody can price it from a phone call.
- Hourly billing on a project with no defined end. That's how a small job quietly becomes a large one.
- A retainer with no written scope. You're paying for a maybe.
- No documentation or handover. If you can't run it without them, you don't own it.
- A number with no written breakdown. A total with nothing under it can't be compared to anything.
We go further into vetting in our guide to hiring an automation consultant in Denver, including the questions that separate builders from resellers.
The Denver part
If you're buying automation here, you're choosing between three kinds of seller.
An offshore shop will quote a fraction of what we charge. For a tightly specified job with clean inputs, that's sometimes the correct call, and we'll tell you so.
A national SaaS vendor with a Denver landing page will sell you a product and a login. Nobody from that company will ever see your operation, and the product does what it does.
Or someone local. What the premium buys is a person who can stand in your shop, watch how the work really happens, and catch the step your team forgot to mention because they've done it for years. That's where scope gets right. Scope is where most automation projects go wrong.
How to budget your first project
Start with the smallest thing that proves the idea. For most businesses that means an audit or a single build. Not a program.
Don't buy a retainer before there's something to maintain. A monthly plan with nothing running is money spent on standby.
And expect the first build to teach you what the second should be. Once one process runs itself, the next bottleneck gets obvious, and you'll scope it better because you've already watched one ship.
If you want a number for your own project, tell us what you're trying to automate and we'll come back with a written scope and a price. If we're the wrong fit, we'll say that too.