Ask three consultancies what an AI readiness audit costs and you will get three answers that differ by two orders of magnitude. All three might be quoting honestly. They are just selling different things under the same name.
If you run a 10-to-200-person business and you are pricing out an AI assessment right now, this post gives you the actual market numbers for 2026, what each tier buys, and how to tell whether a quote is fair for what is being delivered.
We sell one of these audits — ours is $297, and we explain below exactly why it can be — so read this knowing where we sit in the market. Every market figure here is linked to its source.
The 2026 Market, in One Table
| Tier | Typical price | What it is | Who it fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free self-assessments | $0 | Online questionnaires from AWS, Cisco, and others | Orientation, not direction |
| Productized SMB audit | $297 (ours) | Questionnaire + 45-minute interview + written report in 48 hours | 10–200-person SMBs that want a first move, not a strategy deck |
| Boutique SMB engagement | $2,000–$8,000 | A narrow consulting engagement: interviews, workflow review, written recommendations | SMBs with complex operations or compliance constraints |
| Mid-market audit | $5,000–$15,000 | 2–3 week engagement, multiple stakeholders, data infrastructure review | 200–1,000-employee companies |
| Enterprise assessment | $15,000–$50,000+ | Multi-workstream assessment: data platforms, governance, org design | Enterprises with multiple business units |
The spread is real, and it is not (mostly) price gouging. The tiers are different products. The problem is that vendors rarely tell you which product you are being quoted for.
What You Are Actually Paying For
Strip away the branding and an AI readiness audit has three cost drivers:
1. Senior time. The core of any real audit is a structured conversation with someone who has actually implemented AI in businesses like yours, followed by analysis and a written recommendation. Junior researchers running a template produce template output. The hours of a person who can look at your quoting workflow and say "that one, first, with these tools" are the product.
2. Scope. An enterprise assessment covers data platforms, security posture, governance frameworks, and organizational design across business units. That genuinely takes weeks and a team. An SMB with 40 employees, a CRM, QuickBooks, and a shared drive does not need any of that — it needs to know which of its five most time-consuming workflows to automate first.
3. The business model behind the quote. This is the driver nobody discloses. Many audits are priced as paid discovery for a six-figure implementation pipeline — the audit fee subsidizes the sales process, and the report is written to justify the engagement that follows. That is not inherently dishonest, but you should know whether your "independent assessment" has a commission riding on its conclusions.
Why Free Assessments Are Not Enough
The free tools from AWS and Cisco are well-built and worth 20 minutes. But they are self-assessments: they score your answers about your own readiness. They cannot tell you that your invoice-matching process is a better first automation than the chatbot you were considering, because they never look at your business. They also exist to orient you toward their platforms — which is fair, and disclosed, and still a limitation.
Use them for orientation. Do not mistake a score for a plan.
Why Ours Is $297
An honest answer, since this post is asking other vendors for one.
Scope discipline. Our audit answers three questions: where your team is losing the most time to manual work, which workflows are realistic automation candidates given your current tools, and what the right first move is. That is deliverable as a 10-minute questionnaire, a 45-minute interview, and a written report in 48 hours. We do not assess data platforms or governance frameworks, because a 40-person business does not need that assessed.
Modern production economics. We use AI heavily in our own research and report production — the same operations-grade automation we recommend to clients. The senior judgment in the interview and the recommendations is human; the production overhead around it is largely automated. A consultancy billing $250/hour for analyst time has a cost structure that forces a $5,000 price. We do not.
No subsidized sales pipeline. The audit is priced to stand alone. Most clients take the report and implement it themselves or with their own contractor — and that is a fine outcome. If the findings point to a larger build, the $297 is credited toward the AI Implementation Sprint, and that conversation happens after you have the report, not inside it.
Positioning, honestly. $297 is a price a Metro Detroit owner can say yes to without committee approval. It filters for operators who are serious enough to pay something and lets us prove the work before any larger engagement. That is the business model, stated plainly.
Red Flags at Any Price
Whether a quote is $297 or $29,000, walk away if:
- No written deliverable. A debrief call is not an audit. You should leave with a document you could hand to a contractor.
- No named tools. "A modern AI stack" is not a recommendation. Real reports name the specific platforms and why they fit your existing systems.
- Nobody asks about your workflows. If the process never examines how your business actually operates, the output is a template with your logo on it.
- The report cannot say "don't." An assessment with no "skip this for now" list is a sales document. Some AI investments do not pay off for some businesses, and a real audit names yours.
- The price is hidden. If you have to book a call to learn the cost, the cost depends on the call. Notice how few audit vendors publish a number.
The Bottom Line
For a 10-to-200-person business in 2026, the market says a real, human-conducted AI readiness audit costs $2,000–$8,000 from a boutique consultancy. Free tools are orientation, not direction. Enterprise pricing is for enterprise scope.
Ours is $297, delivered in 48 hours, for the reasons above — and you can see a real sample report before you pay anything, which is the comparison test we would suggest running on anyone you are evaluating, including us.
