Every agency site in this country says "contact us for a quote". It is a reasonable position and it is also why you are on your fourth tab trying to work out whether this is a five thousand dollar problem or a fifty thousand dollar one.
You need that number before you can have a conversation internally. So here it is, from a Sydney consultancy that does this work, with the reasoning attached. These are our real published rates, not a range invented for an article.
The short version
Most AI automation work for a small or mid-sized Australian business lands between $8,000 and $20,000. Below that you are buying a single fix rather than a system. Above it you are usually buying a change to how the business runs, not a tool.
Day rates in this market sit between roughly $1,500 and $4,000 depending on who is actually doing the work. Ours run $2,500 to $3,500 excluding GST. If someone quotes you $800 a day, you are being sold offshore labour with a local account manager, and the integration work will be your problem. If someone quotes $6,000, you are paying for a partner's overhead and a junior's hands.
What the tiers actually mean
$4,000 to $8,000, one to four weeks. One problem, properly solved. A website that works, a lead capture that fires, a single process automated end to end. You are not integrating anything complicated. Most sole traders and small teams start here and it is often all they need for a year.
$8,000 to $20,000, four to eight weeks. The systems start talking. A CRM that actually reflects reality, two or three platforms connected, workflows that used to be a person copying between tabs. This is where the hours come back, and it is where most of the value in this category sits.
$25,000 to $60,000 and up, eight to sixteen weeks. AI doing real work in production: agents, custom tools, knowledge bases, regulatory scanning. A roadmap, a suite live in production, training and documentation. You buy this when the manual process is a strategic problem rather than an annoyance.
All three exclude GST and are quoted in a proposal against a fixed scope. Clients outside Australia are invoiced GST-free as an export of services.
What actually drives the number
Not the AI. The AI is the cheap part and getting cheaper every quarter. Four things move a quote, in rough order of impact.
How many systems have to talk to each other. One system is a script. Three systems is an integration project. The cost is not linear, because every connection can fail in both directions and every failure needs handling.
Whether your data is in a state anyone can use. This is the one that surprises people. If your customer records live in three places with different spellings, that is not an AI problem and no model fixes it. Cleaning it is real work, it happens before anything intelligent can be built, and it is often a third of the engagement.
Whether it has to be right, or only usually right. An internal drafting tool that a human reviews is straightforward. Something customer-facing, or something touching money or compliance, needs guardrails, testing and a fallback path. That is a different piece of work at a different price.
Whether anyone will use it afterwards. Training and documentation are the first things cut from a quote and the reason most automation quietly stops being used by month three. Budget for them or accept you are buying a demo.
The three things that blow a budget
Scope agreed in a meeting rather than in writing. "While you are in there, could it also…" is how a $12,000 project becomes a $30,000 one, one reasonable request at a time. Every change should have a number attached before it starts, even if the number is zero.
Hourly billing with no cap. Hourly aligns the consultant's income with the project taking longer. Fixed scope and fixed price puts that risk where it belongs. Ask for it. If a consultant cannot quote a fixed price, they do not yet understand your problem well enough to start.
Nobody named as the decision maker. The single most expensive thing in any project is waiting. A build that stalls for three weeks because four people have opinions and none has authority costs the same as a build that ships, and it costs it twice.
How to find out what yours costs
Two hours of paid discovery. We map your current systems, find where the hours actually leak, and write a recommendation with a number on it. It is A$550 including GST, and the full A$550 is credited toward any project we do together.
It is paid for a reason. Two hours of real analysis beats six coffees of maybe, and you walk away with something you can act on with anyone, including not us. That is the point: the recommendation is yours either way.
The full rate card, including day and weekly rates and every add-on, is published on the services page. If you are earlier than that and just working out whether to hire anyone at all, start with what an AI consultant in Sydney actually does.
Prices in Australian dollars, correct at 31 July 2026. Project ranges and rates exclude GST and are quoted in a proposal. The discovery session is a fixed A$550 including GST, paid at booking.