Your number
$5,950
Your rate card
- Day rate$950 per day
- Hourlyfor anything that does not fit a day$125 per hour
- An AI workflow$5,950 per project
- Monthly retainertuning, monitoring, new flows$4,750 per month
What to charge for each thing (5)
- Chatbot or assistant$4,200 each
- Document or data pipeline$6,300 each
- Prompt system and evals$1,750 each
- Internal tool with AI$8,400 each
- Monthly tuning$1,750 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 $5,950.
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 $800; you sit inside the range, so quote it without apology.
An AI workflow runs $2,000 to $15,000 and takes about 30 hours of your time; at your hourly that is $3,750. 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.