AI for small business: what you can actually afford.
Most AI marketing is aimed at companies with a procurement department, which has left smaller businesses assuming the whole category is out of reach. It is not. The affordable version is real, it is just quieter.
What is genuinely affordable now
A customer-service assistant that answers your top questions from your own content is a $1,500 build. A full chat, voice, web or mobile product is $3,500. For comparison, the wider market quotes custom AI chatbots at $20,000–$80,000 and freelancers at $60–$150 an hour, which is what most owners have been quoted and why most have walked away.
Where the money actually comes back
For a small business the return is rarely headcount — you do not have headcount to remove. It is the three things that quietly cost you customers:
- Calls you miss. Every unanswered enquiry is revenue that went to whoever picked up. A voice assistant that answers at 9pm on a Sunday is not a luxury.
- Replies that take two days. Speed to response is one of the strongest predictors of who wins the job.
- The owner’s evenings. Hours spent answering the same forty questions is the most expensive labour in the business, because it is the labour that should be selling.
What to skip
Skip anything sold as a platform with per-seat pricing until you have proven one workflow. Skip a bespoke build of something generic — if ten thousand businesses need the identical thing, buy the subscription. Skip any vendor who will not tell you a price without a call; that is a signal about how the rest of the relationship will go.
$1,500 to start, $3,500 for a full build, both fixed. No seats, no subscription, and you own the result. Every build ships in your cloud, under your accounts, with the repository in your name. See your price in three questions, grade us first with the AI Vendor Scorecard, or book a call with an Applied AI Scientist.