Search for what on-premise AI costs a small business and you will find consultancies that do not publish a number. Here are ours, with what each line buys, the shape of business they fit, and the honest cases where the math does not work.
These are estimates calibrated to a specific kind of office, described below. The exact figure comes out of the assessment in writing before anything is built. Anyone who quotes a payback number before seeing your volumes is guessing, which is why the first line item exists.
The numbers
| Line | Range | What it buys |
|---|---|---|
| Assessment | $3,500, credited if you proceed | On site, watching the real work and measuring volumes. Workflow map, hours, gate specifications, build plan with fixed pricing, and anything we think you should not automate. Delivered within 14 to 30 days, yours to keep either way. |
| First workflow, installed | $18,000 to $32,000 one time | The platform plus one high-volume task: built with its gates, wired into your systems, staff trained, proven on your real documents end to end before sign-off. |
| Each additional workflow | $6,000 to $12,000 one time | Only the workflow and its gates are new; the platform is already in place. No long contract. You decide if there is a next one. |
| Hardware | $6,000 to $14,000 once, you own it | The inference node, GPU workstation to small-server class with 64 to 128GB of memory, at cost plus a documented margin. We show you the invoice. A depreciable asset on your books that stays if we ever part ways. |
| Ongoing | $900 to $2,200 per month | Monitoring, model updates re-tested against your gates before promotion, gate adjustments as your work changes, a person who answers the phone, and a monthly report of runs, passes, failures and hours recovered. |
Who these numbers fit
An 8 to 25 person professional office with steady document volume: a CPA firm through filing season, a title company closing weekly, a law firm with active matters, an advisory firm with a full client book. Typically three to five workflows on a single node at one location.
It runs lower with fewer workflows, modern systems with clean interfaces, a single location and lighter regulatory overhead. A two-workflow build for a small insurance agency can land under the published floor.
It runs higher with more workflows, legacy or fragmented systems that need custom integration, air-gap requirements, or multiple entities and locations. Hospital systems and government agencies are a different scale and are quoted separately.
Cloud AI by comparison
Cloud AI is priced per user per month, forever, and you own nothing at the end. For a 15-person office that is 15 seats, every month, plus per-token API costs for anything automated, plus the vendor review your security plan or bar rules require. The on-site node is a one-time purchase whose marginal cost per task is electricity, and once the hardware is yours, the routine tier, roughly 60 percent of a typical workload, stops being a subscription.
That is not an argument that on-site is always cheaper. It is cheaper above a certain volume, and the payback piece lays out the four numbers that decide where that line is for you. Below it, a cloud subscription with the training setting turned off may be the right answer, and the assessment will say so.
When we say no
A small office with light volume may never pay back the hardware. When the math does not work, we tell you, because a bad-fit deployment costs us more than the invoice earns. That is $3,500 to find out, against $40,000 to find out the hard way.
What you are not paying for
- Per-token fees on the routine tier. The model is yours.
- Capabilities in development. Everything listed as ready on our site is running today. Anything marked in build is not invoiced until it works.
- A long contract. Each workflow has to earn the next one.
- A ticket queue. The people who built your system are the ones who answer the phone.
The assessment is yours either way. If you take it to another vendor or do nothing at all, it was still worth having.
Questions people ask
How much does AI cost for a small business? For cloud tools, a per-seat subscription and, for anything automated, per-token API fees that grow with success. For on-site, the one-time ranges above plus a monthly support line, with the routine tier running at the cost of electricity.
Can we start smaller than the first-workflow price? The assessment is the small start. It costs $3,500, it produces a fixed quote, and it is credited against the first workflow if you go ahead.
What if a stronger model comes out next year? It gets benchmarked against your gates before it replaces anything. The hardware does not change; the weights do.