What an AI Consultant Costs

What is actually published

Very little, which is the first thing worth knowing. Most AI consultancies quote on a call. One firm that does publish a rate card is Gun.io, and its engineering rates are a reasonable floor for what this kind of work costs:

At $150 an hour, ten hours a week is $78,000 a year. That is the number to hold in your head when an hourly quote arrives without an estimate attached to it.

What hourly billing does to the incentives

This is the part worth more than the rate. Under an hourly arrangement, your cost tracks the consultant’s speed rather than your outcome. Nobody is dishonest about this; it is simply that finishing early is the one outcome that pays the seller least.

Every pricing model has a version of this problem. Fixed-fee pushes the seller to define scope narrowly and bill change orders. Usage-based means your bill rises exactly as the thing succeeds. A flat monthly fee means the seller carries the variance — which is the arrangement we use, and it is not generosity, it is the model that makes us care about efficiency.

The full comparison of pricing models is here.

When a consultant is the right call

• You need a decision, not a build. “Should we do this at all?” is a few days of someone senior, and paying hourly for it is correct.
• You have an internal team that needs unblocking. An expert for twenty hours beats an agency for twelve months.
• The work is genuinely one-off. A migration, an audit, a second opinion on someone else’s architecture.
• You want to keep the knowledge. A consultant who teaches your team leaves something behind that an agency arrangement does not.

What a consultant does not do is own the thing afterwards. If the answer to “who fixes this at 2am in March?” is nobody, an hourly engagement has not solved your problem, it has deferred it.