Your number
$8,500
Your rate card
- Day rate$1,150 per day
- Hourlyfor anything that does not fit a day$150 per hour
- An AI workflow$8,500 per project
- Monthly retainertuning, monitoring, new flows$6,800 per month
What to charge for each thing (5)
- Chatbot or assistant$6,000 each
- Document or data pipeline$9,000 each
- Prompt system and evals$2,500 each
- Internal tool with AI$12,000 each
- Monthly tuning$2,500 per month
US rates for ai automation and agent builders at your level, adjusted for your market. What you last got wins.
For an ai workflow, the quote is $8,500.
To take home $85,000 after $9,000 of costs and 30% tax you need to bill $134,286 a year. At 24 billable hours a week for 47 weeks that is $125 an hour, $950 a day. Anything under that is a pay cut you did not agree to.
AI automation and agent builders at your level day at about $1,150 ($700 to $1,600 in New York and LA). Your income math lands under that, so the market number is the one to quote; the gap is a raise you are owed.
An AI workflow runs $2,000 to $15,000 and takes about 30 hours of your time; at your hourly that is $4,500. The number is the higher of the two, because the client is buying the outcome, not the hours.
A retainer is the month, not the hours: tuning, monitoring, new flows. It is priced about 20% under the same work bought one at a time, in exchange for the certainty; three months minimum, or it is not a retainer.