What am I actually paying for?
Three things, and it helps to separate them. There is setup - the one-off work of building and connecting the automation to your tools. There is ongoing cost - either cheap tool subscriptions you run yourself, or a monthly fee if someone maintains it for you. And there is the hidden one: your own time, both to run DIY tools and to fix them when they break. The cheapest sticker price is not always the cheapest over a year.
Most pages that answer this question stop there, with one vague number covering all three. I would rather split them apart, because they behave differently. Setup is a number you can compare directly between options. Ongoing cost is a number you can budget for month to month. Your own time is the one nobody prices, and it is usually the one that decides whether an automation actually gets built and used, or sits half-finished in a folder somewhere.
Why the number range online is so wide
Search this question and you will find a dozen sites quoting some version of the same shape of number, often "USD 1,500 to 12,000", with no source, no method, and no company putting its own name next to the figure. Some of that is copied from one article to the next. Some of it is a genuine average across a huge range of projects, from a one-hour Zap to a six-month enterprise build, mashed into a single range that tells you almost nothing about your own job.
I cannot tell you what every agency in the world charges, and I am not going to pretend I can. What I can tell you is what I charge, in public, for the work I actually do. The three prices further down this page are not a market estimate pulled from somewhere else. They are what a client pays me this month if they sign up today.
Real price ranges: simple, mid, and complex
As a rough guide from what providers charge in 2026: a simple setup, like one or two automations, is often USD 1,500 to 5,000 as a one-off. A fuller setup covering most of your admin runs higher. Ongoing tooling for a small business is often USD 100 to 300 a month, rising to USD 1,000 to 3,500 a month if an agency runs everything. These are typical market ranges, not a quote - your number depends on scope.
What separates the three tiers is not cleverness, it is surface area. Simple means one workflow with one trigger: a form gets filled in, an email goes out. Mid means a handful of workflows that share data, so a quote can become an invoice can become a follow-up without you touching it in between. Complex means a dozen systems working across sales, admin, and delivery, each one built to fit how you actually run the business rather than how a generic template assumes you do. Price climbs with how many places the automation has to reach into, not with how impressive it sounds on a sales page.
What Quietly Smart actually charges
Here is the breakdown, with nothing rounded off and nothing hidden behind a "contact us for pricing" form.
| Bottleneck Audit | AI Chief of Staff Setup | Monthly Consultation | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | A short paid diagnostic | A one-off build of the systems you choose | An ongoing monthly working relationship |
| Price | USD 795, one-off | From USD 3,995, one-off | USD 950 a month, stop any month |
| What's included | Every job you do by hand mapped, the six worth fixing first ranked, a 45-minute call, a 90-day roadmap you keep | Two, six, or twelve systems built and delivered as files, done in one block | Two 45-minute calls a month, one new system built each month, questions answered the next working day |
| Who it suits | Anyone who is not yet sure what to fix first | Someone who already knows what they want built and would rather have it done in one go | Someone who wants steady progress and a working relationship, without a large bill up front |
| What you own afterward | A written report and a ranked list, yours regardless of what you build next | The finished systems, running on your own computer, no ongoing fee required | Everything built up to the point you stop, still running on your own computer |
The Bottleneck Audit is the cheap way to stop guessing. USD 795, seven days, one call. I map every job you currently do by hand and rank the six worth fixing first, by what they actually cost you in time or missed follow-up, and you keep the roadmap whether or not you build anything with me afterward.
The AI Chief of Staff Setup is the owned option. You choose two, six, or twelve systems, from USD 3,995, USD 5,995, or USD 9,995, and I build them in one block rather than spread across months. They are delivered as files that run on your own computer, through your own Claude or ChatGPT account, so there is no ongoing fee required to keep them working. An optional USD 295 a month care plan covers maintenance if a tool changes underneath you, but it is not rent: cancel it and the systems keep running.
The Monthly Consultation is the relationship option. USD 950 a month, two 45-minute calls, one new system built into your business every month, and you can stop in any month you like. Everything built up to that point stays on your computer and keeps working, whether or not you keep paying me. It suits someone who wants steady progress without a large bill up front, and who would rather work down a list of problems one at a time than commit to all twelve at once.
DIY subscriptions vs done-for-you vs an agency retainer
DIY tools are cheapest up front and most expensive in your time. A done-for-you setup costs more once, then it is yours to keep. An agency retainer spreads cost into a monthly fee but you are renting, not owning. The right choice depends on whether you would rather pay in money, in time, or in a subscription that never ends.
Put a number on the DIY route and it looks like this: a ChatGPT subscription plus an automation platform like Zapier or Make usually runs somewhere around USD 50 to 300 a month, depending on how much you use and how many steps you wire together. On the sticker price alone, that beats every option on this page. What it does not include is the time you spend building it, the evening you lose when a step breaks quietly, or the fact that nobody but you knows how it works. I have written a longer, more even-handed comparison of DIY automation against hiring a consultant if you want the full argument. The short version: DIY is genuinely the right call for a single, simple workflow. It gets expensive in a different currency once you are relying on it every day.
What drives the price up or down?
Three things move the number most: how many workflows you automate, how many tools they have to talk to, and how tidy your starting point is. Messy data and scattered tools add work. A clear, common setup - Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, one system for quotes and invoices - keeps it lower.
A fourth thing matters just as much and rarely gets mentioned: how much of the process lives in your head rather than on paper. If you can describe exactly how a quote becomes a job in five clear steps, that is a fast, cheap build. If the real process is "I just know who to chase and when", someone has to sit with you and pull that out of your head before anything gets automated, and that discovery work is real time, whether it is billed separately or folded into the price you are quoted.
The hidden costs nobody prices
There are three costs that rarely show up on a pricing page, and all three are worth knowing before you sign anything.
The first is your own time before the build starts. Any specialist, me included, works faster against a process that is already written down somewhere, even roughly, than against one that only exists in your head. An hour spent listing your actual steps before the first call usually saves more than an hour of back and forth later.
The second is the cost of a messy starting point. If your quotes live in three different formats, your customer list is split across two systems, and nobody agrees on what "done" means for a job, that mess has to get sorted before an automation can sit on top of it cleanly. It is not a hidden fee so much as hidden time, and it is the single biggest reason one business's "simple" automation ends up costing more than another's.
The third is the tools underneath. My fee, whichever of the three above you pick, covers the build and the setup. It does not usually cover every piece of software the automation runs on. If the system needs an email platform, a CRM, or an AI subscription like Claude or ChatGPT, that subscription is yours to keep paying, typically from around USD 20 a month for the AI side, plus whatever your existing tools already cost for the rest. I would rather say that plainly here than have you find it out after signing.
What is the payback, realistically?
For frequent admin, payback is usually quick. Most small setups pay for themselves within a few months, and one large study by IDC for Microsoft put the average return on generative AI at about USD 3.70 for every dollar invested, with most setups live in under eight months. The catch is that this only holds when it is aimed at the right, repeatable work.
The maths is simple once you have a real number to work with. If a follow-up you currently forget to send costs you one lost job a quarter, and that job is worth more than the audit or the setup fee, the automation has effectively paid for itself before it has even run for a year. The Bottleneck Audit exists mainly to find that number for your business specifically, rather than have you guess at it from a market average that was never about your business in the first place.
Why owned can beat subscription over two to three years
A subscription looks cheap monthly, but it never stops, and it switches off the day you stop paying. Over two to three years, a one-off setup you own often costs less in total than a rented tool - and you still have it at the end. For the maths to work, though, the setup has to keep earning its keep.
Run the numbers side by side. Take a figure from the middle of the agency range already mentioned above, USD 2,000 a month: over two years that is USD 48,000, and you own nothing when it ends. The AI Chief of Staff Setup at, say, USD 5,995 for six systems, plus the optional USD 295 a month care plan for the full two years, comes to well under USD 13,000, and the systems keep running with or without the care plan. Owning wins on cost once you look past the first invoice. It only loses if the systems built are the wrong ones for the business, which is exactly what the audit exists to prevent.
What a USD 795 audit gets you before you commit
The most expensive mistake is automating the wrong thing. A short paid audit - ours is USD 795 - maps where your business actually waits on you and tells you which one fix is worth building first. It is a small, fixed cost that stops you spending thousands on the wrong automation.
It is also the cheapest way to find out whether any of this is worth doing at all. Seven days, one call, a bottleneck map, and a 90-day roadmap you keep, even if you never build anything with me afterward. Most people who go on to book the Monthly Consultation or the AI Chief of Staff Setup started here, because it turns a vague sense of "admin is eating my week" into a specific, priced list of what to fix first.