What is an hour of your time worth?
I want you to answer two questions before we talk about anything I build. What is an hour of your time worth, and what is the task that eats the most of those hours every week? The price tag for an AI system that takes that task off your plate falls out of that math, not out of a quote I make up.
Most owners can't tell me what their hour is worth
When I ask this in a meeting, the first answer is usually a shrug. The second answer is a guess. The third answer, after a minute of doing the math out loud, lands somewhere honest. Take what you actually pulled out of the business last year, divide by the hours you actually worked, and that is the floor. The ceiling is what you would pay yourself to take a real day off without the business limping.
Most owner-operators I talk to land between $80 and $250 an hour once they do that math. Some land higher. Most land higher than they thought they would. And almost none of them have ever priced anything in their business against that number on purpose.
Now pick the task that takes the most of those hours
Not the hardest task. Not the most strategic. The one that eats the most time. The one you keep meaning to delegate and never can, because nobody else can do it the way you do it, and training somebody to do it would take longer than just doing it again yourself.
For one realtor I work with, it is comparable-pull research before every listing appointment. Two hours every time, several times a week, and it has to be him because he is the one writing the narrative around the comps. For a video producer I just brought on, it is the post-production tail behind a single weekly show. Transcripts, show notes, social cuts, sponsor recap emails. Four hours after each episode, every week, all of it him.
You know the task. It is the one that just made you sigh while reading this.
Multiply the two numbers, then sit with the answer
Hours per week times weeks per year times your hourly value. Write it down. That is the annual cost of doing that one task yourself.
Four hours of the realtor's pre-listing research, fifty weeks, $150 an hour, is $30,000 a year. Four hours of the video producer's post-production, fifty weeks, $200 an hour, is $40,000 a year. Those are not weird numbers and these are not unusual people. These are normal businesses pricing their owners at sane rates.
Now look at that number. That is not what you spent on the task. That is what the task spent on you.
What an AI system actually costs us to build
A custom AI agent that takes one of those tasks off your plate is not free. It is also not what most people think. It is a one-time build, in the range of four to twelve weeks depending on how many systems it has to touch, plus a flat monthly that covers hosting, model usage, and the maintenance that keeps it from drifting six months in.
I price the build by adding up the engineering hours it would actually take and the integrations it needs to live in. That gives me a number. I then check that number against your annual task cost. If the build doesn't pay itself back inside the first year of monthly, I tell you so. If it pays itself back in three months, I tell you that too. Either way you see the math.
I don't try to capture all of your savings. The deal that works long-term is the one where you keep most of the upside and I keep enough margin to do my best work for the next client.
An example that's not mine
The video producer I mentioned will save roughly three of those four post-production hours per episode once his agent is wired up. That is 150 hours a year, or $30,000 against his $200 hour. The build for his case is about $7,500 and the monthly is $350. Year one cost: $11,700. Year one savings: $30,000. Year two and beyond: monthly only, against the same $30,000 a year of his time. The math works because the right number was used to set the bar.
If I had instead asked him "what's your budget for an AI agent" and quoted at the average of his answer, I would have priced lower than what it cost me to build, or higher than what he would pay, and both of us would have lost.
The framework, in one sentence
We price what your time is worth, not what we build. The build is just how we get there.
If you are nodding along but the example I gave isn't yours, send me the task. Tell me the hours and your hour rate. I will tell you within a day whether the math works and what the build would actually cost. If it doesn't pay itself back, I'll say so before either of us spends another minute on it.
Send me the task. Let's see if the math works.
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