What $297 a Month of Managed AI Actually Buys a Small Business
Go looking for what AI automation costs a small business and you will read fifteen pages that never say a number. Every one of them ends at the same place: book a call and we'll scope it. That is not because the answer is complicated. It is because the number is easier to say after somebody has already talked you into wanting it. Here is ours, up front, with what is inside it and what isn't.
Our entry plan is $297 a month plus a $497 one-time setup fee, month-to-month, cancel with 30 days notice. It is called the AI Admin Assistant and it sits on the pricing page next to the other two, with the numbers printed on it.
The useful question is not whether $297 is cheap. Almost anything is cheap next to a payroll line. The useful question is what a small business gets for it, and where the line falls between that and the things people assume they are buying.
The number you are actually comparing it against
Most owners who call us are not choosing between us and another AI company. They are choosing between us and hiring somebody, or between us and continuing to do it themselves at nine at night.
So start with the hire. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median annual wage for secretaries and administrative assistants at $48,310 as of May 2025. Wage is not cost. BLS also reports that for private industry workers, benefits run close to 30% of total compensation — $13.68 an hour in benefits against $32.37 in wages, as of September 2025. Load the median that way and you are somewhere between roughly $4,300 and $5,700 a month before anybody has been trained, before the first sick day, and before the desk.
We are not going to pretend $297 replaces that person. It doesn't, and the sections below say exactly where it stops. What it replaces is a slice of what that person would have spent the week on — the repeated, rule-shaped parts — without adding a payroll line to get it.
Why almost nobody in this market will quote you
The published numbers that do exist are wide. Pricing guides put ongoing managed automation retainers anywhere from about $500 to $2,500 a month for a small business, with the build billed separately on top, and the higher end of the market runs well past that. When a range is that wide, it isn't really a price. It is a placeholder for a conversation.
There is a legitimate reason behind it: a firm that builds custom systems genuinely cannot know the number before it sees your setup. There is also a less legitimate one, which is that a price on a page lets you say no without ever getting on the phone.
We took the other trade. The plans are fixed and public, the scope of each one is fixed and public, and if what you need is bigger than the plan we will tell you on the first call instead of quietly widening the invoice.
What the $297 actually covers, itemized
One to three back-office jobs, run for you. You pick them. Invoice follow-up, appointment scheduling, customer follow-ups, email triage, data entry. Those five are the usual suspects because they are the ones that are repetitive enough to hand over and expensive enough to matter. Our catalogue of 69 AI helpers is where the specific jobs live if you want to see the menu before the call.
We pick the tool, not you. This is the part people underrate. Choosing between four products that all demo well is a job in itself, and getting it wrong costs a month. We choose, and if the choice turns out to be wrong we swap it and eat the migration, because we own the outcome rather than the software licence.
We wire it into what you already use. QuickBooks, Gmail, your scheduler. An AI helper that lives in its own tab and needs you to paste things into it is not automation, it is homework.
We operate it daily. Not "we set it up and hand you a login." Somebody here watches whether it is still doing the job, because tools break quietly — a rule stops firing, an integration expires, a vendor changes an API — and the failure mode nobody plans for is the one where everything looks fine and no invoices have gone out for eleven days.
A 30-minute check-in call each month, and email support with a person on the other end. Modest, and deliberately so. At this tier you should not need us often.
Live within 14 days, or that month is free. That is a real credit on the first invoice, not a claims process. The clock pauses only when we are waiting on access or a decision from you, and we say so in writing when it does.
Then the setup fee. $497, once. It pays for the discovery call, the tool selection, the integration work, writing the rules the helper follows, and testing it against your real data before it goes anywhere near a customer. We keep it visible instead of folding it into the monthly, because a business that quits in month four should not have been paying off a build it no longer uses.
What it does not buy
It does not answer your phone. We don't provide phone answering, and we would rather say that plainly than let you find out in week two.
It does not make judgment calls. A helper chases the invoice. It does not decide that this particular customer is going through something and should be left alone for a week. That is still you, and it should be.
It does not fix a process that does not exist. If nobody can say what currently happens after a job is finished, there is nothing to automate yet. Sometimes the first honest deliverable is writing the process down, and occasionally that alone solves the problem.
It is not everything at once. One to three jobs, each running on its own. The moment the jobs need to hand off to each other — booking triggers the confirmation triggers the reminder triggers the invoice — that is the $697 AI Office Manager plan, and we will say so rather than sell you the cheaper thing twice.
How to tell which tier you are
It is a shorter decision than the pricing table makes it look.
One specific job is eating your week, and you could name it right now without thinking: $297. Three jobs that keep dropping things in the gaps between them: $697. You are effectively running a back office and want the whole thing operated, with bookkeeping handed to a partner CPA and a custom assistant trained on your business: $1,497. All three are month-to-month and all three carry the same 14-day guarantee.
If you want to see the arithmetic on your own numbers first, the back-office ROI calculator takes about two minutes and does not ask for your email to show you the result. Most clients save 10+ hours a week within the first two months, and hours are the honest unit here — what those hours are worth depends entirely on what you would otherwise be doing with them.
This is probably not a fit if…
You want to learn the tools yourself. Then you want software, not us, and you will be better off for it. The tools are cheap and a lot of them are free — we wrote about why that still leaves most back offices in a mess in AI tools are free, so why is your back office still a mess. If you have the time and the appetite, go direct.
The volume isn't there yet. If you send eight invoices a month and two of them are ever late, $297 is not going to pay for itself and we will tell you that on the call. There is a floor under this, and it is about repetition, not revenue.
You need it to be perfect rather than better. Automated follow-up sequences occasionally send at a moment you would not have chosen. If a single awkward email to a customer is unacceptable, this is not the right year for it.
You want one big system built and then owned outright. That is a different shape of engagement — closer to AI system building or the starter bundle — and a monthly managed plan is the wrong wrapper for it.
If none of those describe you, book a free 30-minute call and bring the one job you would hand over first. We will tell you whether $297 covers it, whether it is really the $697 plan, or whether you should keep your money and write the process down instead.