AI automation agency pricing 2026, compared across 20 price lists

Ask two agencies to quote the same automation and the answers can sit thousands of dollars apart. We hear that from nearly every owner who arrives after shopping around, and it is usually the reason they stopped shopping. So in August 2026 we opened the websites of 20 AI automation agencies in the US, the UK and elsewhere and wrote down every price we could read without booking a call: paid audits, fixed build ranges, retainer tiers, day rates, fractional packages. What follows is AI automation agency pricing 2026 as the agencies themselves publish it, with each one named.

Naming them is the point. Every roundup we found on this topic reports ranges with no source behind them, which means you cannot check the number or go and read the offer it came from. Each figure below has a company attached to it, and each was published on that company's own site when we looked.

All twenty, with the prices they publish

Agency	Base	Published prices, August 2026
The AI Consultancy	UK	Diagnostic audit from £495. Readiness Sprint from £3,500 (2 weeks, 50% credited within 90 days). Discovery and Pilot from £15,000, typically £15k to £35k. Build and Embed £40k to £90k for SMEs, £90k to £250k enterprise. Day rate £950 to £1,500. Fractional CAIO £3,000 / £5,000 / £8,500 a month. Chatbots at £3k, £8k, £25k. Voice from £5k to £12k. Production Clinic rescue: £350 to £750 quick fix, £1,250 to £3,500 deployment rescue, £8k to £25k refactor. Support £950 to £3,500 a month. Payment 30/40/30.
Startrise AI Labs	US	Around 25 fixed SKUs. AI Assistant from $900. Voice bots $2,400. Workflow automation $2,500. Vibe code cleanup $2,500. Monitoring and guardrails $2,500. AI project rescue $3,500. AI agents $3,500. Security audit and red-teaming $4,500. Control centers $5,000. MVP $7,500. Compliance readiness $7,500. SaaS build $15,000. Automatic SEO $299/mo. Care plans from $2,500/mo. Human-agent teams $6,000/mo.
CloudNSite	US	Current State Assessment $999. Defined automation build from $8,000. Managed care from $1,500/mo. AI readiness and governance sprint $7,500. Fractional AI office $6,000 to $8,000/mo. On-site activation $30,000 plus travel.
The Automation Agency	UK	Simple automation £350. Single AI workflow or agent £750. Chatbot £750. Internal tool or dashboard £1,500. Process Audit £1,500 fixed, credited if a build follows. Automation build from £3,000 over 2 to 6 weeks. Multi-agent from £8,000. Retainer £1,500/mo rolling.
Palavir	US	Custom market report from $1,500. Consulting discovery $2,000. Audit $2,500 single workflow, $5,000 multi. Build $25,000 fixed in 10 working days. Consulting retainer $7,500 to $10,000/mo.
Zaps Studio	UK/US	Workflow Rescue Sprint from $1,000 over 2 to 4 weeks. Revenue Operations System from $3,000 over 4 to 6 weeks. Automation Partner from $500/mo. Free audit.
LeftClick	US	Engagements start at $5,000. Most projects $10,000 to $50,000 fixed, no hourly billing. Free funnel audit.
Justin McKelvey	US	AI Readiness Assessment $2,500 flat over 2 weeks, credited in full within 90 days. Claude install from $4,500 plus optional $1,500/mo retainer. Vibe Code Rescue $25,000 to $50,000. Free 20-minute repo audit.
Aegis Designs	US	Build plus subscription tiers. Anchor $1,500/mo plus a $5,000 to $7,500 build. Growth $3,200/mo plus $7,500 to $15,000. Scale $6,500/mo plus $15,000 and up. All month to month.
MQLFlow	UK	Automation strategy from £3,200. Automation set-up from £800. AI agents from £4,000. Live dashboards from £2,400. Personalised outreach from £1,200. Retained services from £200/mo. Day rate £800.
XRAY	US	$250/hour on demand. Hour blocks: $1,000 for 4h, $2,500 for 10h, $5,000 for 20h. Design Sprint $15,000. Full service $15,000/mo.
2V Automation	US	Public pricing removed during 2026. Previously $5,000 to $20,000 per project, retainers from $1,000/mo.
AY Automate	US	Public pricing removed during 2026. Previously discovery from $4,500, builds $8,000 to $35,000, retainers $500 to $3,000/mo, fractional at $6,500 / $9,500 / $15,000 a month.
Buldrr	Global	Starter $400 to $1,200. Growth $1,500 to $4,500. Scale retainer $1,200 to $8,000/mo with queued requests.
Podlevskikh	Global	Free diagnosis within 24 hours. Rescue $250 to $800 with 48 to 72 hour turnaround. New builds $500 to $3,500. Retainer from $300/mo.
Axivon	UK	Revenue Leakage Review £495, fully credited. Business Brain Programme £1,995 over 90 days. First implementation £4,000 to £12,000. Support £300 to £900/mo. Day rate £550.
Devaland	Global	Paid pilot from $2,500. Fixed builds $8,000 to $25,000. Fractional from $4,000/mo. Day rate from $750.
Aloa	US	Flexible consultancy from $3,000. Proof of concept $20,000 to $30,000. Production ready $50,000 to $150,000. Enterprise $150,000 to $300,000 and up.
Winder.AI	UK	£150 to £400/hour. Sprints £10k to £50k. Proof of concept £15k to £40k. Pilot £40k to £120k. Production £120k to £400k. Year-one operations 15 to 25% of build cost.
Blue Orange Digital	US	Assess $25,000 to $50,000 over 2 to 4 weeks. Deploy $150,000 to $500,000. Scale $500,000 and up. Advisor $15,000 to $30,000/mo.

Read down that column and the market sorts itself into three populations that barely compete: solo operators and small studios selling fixed SKUs under $15,000, mid-sized firms selling programmes from $15,000 to $50,000, and consultancies selling six-figure engagements with procurement paperwork attached. A buyer comparing a quote from the first group against one from the third is not comparing two prices for the same thing.

The spread is much narrower than the internet claims

The figure that gets repeated in every thread on this subject is that agency quotes vary by 100 times. Our own opening paragraph used to imply something close to it. Having read all twenty lists, we think that number is wrong and worth correcting.

Compare like with like, meaning a production automation build for a mid-market company, and the ratio between the cheapest and the most expensive published price is roughly seven to seventeen times. The Automation Agency starts at £350 for a single simple automation; Startrise will sell you a SaaS build at $15,000; Palavir quotes $25,000 fixed. That is a real spread and it deserves an explanation, which the last section of this post gives. It is not 100x.

The 100x impression comes from putting Podlevskikh's $500 build next to Blue Orange Digital's $500,000 deployment and treating them as competitors. Those two sell to different buyers, and neither would take the other's job.

Paid audits cluster at five recognisable anchors

Most of the serious shops now charge for the diagnostic step, and the fees are not scattered. They land on a handful of numbers:

• £495 at The AI Consultancy and at Axivon, whose Revenue Leakage Review is the same price
• $999 for CloudNSite's Current State Assessment, the lowest four-figure anchor on the list
• £1,500 for The Automation Agency's Process Audit
• $2,500 for both Palavir's single-workflow audit and Justin McKelvey's AI Readiness Assessment, which is also where ours sits
• £3,500 for The AI Consultancy's two-week Readiness Sprint, the top of the mid-market band before you are into enterprise assessment pricing, where Blue Orange Digital charges $25,000 to $50,000 just to look

The fee is the least useful part to compare, because what a paid AI opportunity audit actually contains varies more than the price does. Ours is $2,500, and if you proceed to a build within 90 days the whole fee comes off the build price. The $500 written diagnostic works the same way.

Four grades of credit-back promise, wearing the same words

Almost every agency selling a paid audit says it is credited. Read the sentence carefully, because there are four materially different offers here:

1. Credited in full, with a deadline you can hold them to. Justin McKelvey credits the $2,500 assessment in full within 90 days. Axivon credits the £495 review fully. Ours is 90 days on both the $500 diagnostic and the $2,500 audit.
2. Credited in part. The AI Consultancy credits 50% of the £3,500 Readiness Sprint within 90 days. Half of a paid engagement is still a paid engagement.
3. Credited only if a build follows. The Automation Agency's £1,500 Process Audit is credited if you buy a build. Fair, and it means the credit is worth nothing if the honest answer turns out to be that you should not build anything.
4. Not credited. Plenty of paid discovery is simply sold as consulting. That is a legitimate product. It is a different purchase from a deposit.

The grade matters most in the case nobody plans for: the audit concludes that the project is a bad idea. Under grade one you have bought a cheap escape. Under grade three you have bought a bill.

Builds run £350 to $15,000 in the mid-market, and the floor tells you something

Published fixed-build pricing for the mid-market starts at £350 for one simple automation at The Automation Agency and $400 at Buldrr, and runs to $15,000 at the top of the fixed-price band. Below about $900 you are almost always buying a template installed on your account rather than something built for your process. Above $15,000 you have left the mid-market: Aloa quotes $50,000 to $150,000 for production-ready work, and Winder.AI publishes £120,000 to £400,000, which pays for governance, procurement paperwork and a bench of people on top of software that is rarely different in kind from what a $12,000 sprint produces.

We sit inside that band on purpose. Our builds are $3,000 to $15,000 fixed, half paid up front and half on delivery. The reasoning behind fixed rather than hourly is in the case for fixed-price AI work, and LeftClick makes the same argument publicly, refusing hourly billing outright.

Retainers, day rates, and the $15,000 anchor

Retainers on these twenty lists span $200 to $8,500 a month. MQLFlow starts at £200, Podlevskikh at $300, Zaps at $500, ours at $1,500, and The AI Consultancy's fractional CAIO tops out at £8,500. The spread reflects response times and whether new development is included or only maintenance, and the cheap end of it is usually a support inbox rather than somebody watching your systems.

Day rates run £550 at Axivon, £800 at MQLFlow, £950 to £1,500 at The AI Consultancy, and £150 to £400 an hour at Winder.AI. XRAY publishes $250 an hour with prepaid blocks, which is the most legible hourly offer we found.

The number that puts all of this in proportion is what a US in-house automation engineer costs fully loaded: $13,500 to $15,000 a month once salary, payroll tax, benefits and tooling are added up on a $150,000 to $200,000 base. Judge every agency price against that. A $2,500 retainer is about a sixth of one engineer, and the rest of the arithmetic for agency versus freelancer versus in-house runs off the same number, as does the break-even on a fractional engineer.

Our care plans are $1,500, $2,500 and $4,000 a month, and what a care retainer should include at that price is monitoring that reaches a person, a fix window in the contract, one improvement a month and a report you can read in three minutes.

Public pricing is disappearing

The finding we did not expect is that transparency is contracting at the top of this market. Two agencies on our list published full price lists in 2024 and 2025 and took them down during 2026. 2V Automation previously showed $5,000 to $20,000 per project with retainers from $1,000 a month. AY Automate previously showed discovery from $4,500, builds from $8,000 to $35,000, retainers from $500 to $3,000 a month, and three fractional tiers at $6,500, $9,500 and $15,000. Both now ask you to book a call.

The usual reason is a move upmarket. Once your median deal is $80,000 and each one is scoped from scratch, a public floor of $8,000 costs you more in mis-anchored conversations than it earns in inbound. We understand the arithmetic and we expect to face it eventually.

My opinion is that a hidden price list is still a tell for a buyer at our end of the market. If an agency will not put a floor on its site, expect the quote to be sized partly to your budget. That is also the caveat this whole post owes you: we publish partly because we are one engineer with nothing to lose by it. If we are still publishing prices at thirty people, ask us again then.

What separates a $3,000 build from a $30,000 one

Four things, and the AI model is none of them.

Scope

Cheap quotes are cheap because nobody wrote down what done means. A quote worth the name lists the workflows, the systems each one touches, the edge cases it handles and the acceptance test. Producing that document is work, which is why agencies charge for the audit that produces it.

Hardening

A demo that runs once costs a fraction of a system that runs every day. Error handling, a retry limit, logging, an alert that reaches a human, and testing against messy real data roughly double the effort of the happy path, and this is the largest hidden difference between two quotes for the same project. One rescue we scoped this year was a lead-routing flow in n8n that ran about 200 times a day and failed about once a day, with its alerts posting to a Slack channel that had been archived months earlier. The original build had been cheap. The pattern in that one, where the red node is never where the trouble started, is why an n8n workflow keeps failing in production, and the triage order is written up at what to do when an automation stops working.

Who owns the accounts

Some agencies build on their own platform accounts and rent the result back to you. Lower sticker price, permanent lock-in. Ask whose name is on every account before you sign anything, and use the handover checklist to ask it precisely.

What happens in month two

Our builds carry a 30-day bug warranty. Winder.AI is unusually direct about the ongoing number, publishing year-one operations at 15 to 25% of the build cost, which is a useful rule of thumb even when the agency you are talking to will not say it. Many of the twenty price lists say nothing at all about what happens after handover, which in practice tends to mean hourly.

If you are holding quotes now, set each one against the table above and ask what is in scope, how it is hardened, whose name is on the accounts, and what the first month after handover costs. Those four questions, plus the rest of the list we would ask, are worth more than the price comparison itself. Our own numbers are on the pricing page in full, so you have at least one fixed point to compare against.