What should an AI audit cost a small business — and what should you get for it?
Short answer: "AI audit" covers everything from a free sales call to a five-figure consultancy engagement. What separates a good one from a bad one is not the price — it is whether you walk away with named jobs, named tools, costed, with the arithmetic shown.
Why the price range is so wide
There is no standard product behind the words. Three very different things are sold under the same label: a lead-generation conversation, a structured assessment with a written output, and a full consultancy review. All three may be called an audit, which is why asking "what does an AI audit cost?" returns such useless answers.
We are not going to quote other firms' prices here, because they change and we would be wrong within a month. What is stable is the shape of the bands and what you should expect from each.
Free
Usually a discovery call with someone who wants to sell you implementation. That is not dishonest — it can be genuinely useful, and a good consultant will tell you things worth knowing in an hour. But understand what it is: the output is a proposal, not an independent plan, and the recommendations will tend towards work the firm does.
Worth taking if you are already considering that supplier. Not a substitute for knowing your own numbers first.
Low hundreds
A productised assessment: you answer structured questions, you get a written, costed plan. The value is that it is cheap enough to be an easy decision and specific enough to act on. The limit is that it works from what you tell it, so the quality of the output depends on the honesty of your answers, and it will not uncover something you did not mention.
This is where our own product sits, so treat us as interested parties and judge it on the checklist below.
Low thousands and up
A consultant on site, interviewing staff, watching processes, mapping systems. This earns its money when the problem is genuinely tangled — several systems that do not talk to each other, a team with conflicting views, or a decision big enough that being wrong is expensive. For a five-person business with an obvious admin bottleneck, it is usually more diagnosis than the patient needs.
The checklist: what any audit should give you
Whatever you pay, ask for these before you commit. If a supplier cannot say yes to most of them, the price is not the problem.
Named jobs, not themes. "Automate quote follow-up" is a job. "Leverage AI across sales" is not.
Named tools with costs and setup time. Including the option of tools you already pay for. Any audit that recommends only expensive new software is telling you about itself.
Arithmetic you can check. Hours, hourly rate, weeks, net of what the tools cost. If you cannot reproduce the savings figure on the back of an envelope, it is marketing.
An order of play. What to do first, and why that before the other things.
Honesty about what not to do. A list with nothing ruled out has not been thought about.
No lock-in to the auditor. You should be able to do the quick wins yourself. If the plan only works with the supplier attached, it is a quotation.
What we charge and what you get
Our AI Tools Report is £59.99 inc VAT: about ten minutes of questions, then a nine-slide costed report emailed within minutes — executive summary with hours reclaimable, impact–effort matrix, six quick wins as problem and fix, recommended tools with cost and setup time, a four-day quick-wins plan, the bigger projects that come next, financial impact as a monthly net return, and next steps. Savings are capped and rounded down and every number is shown.
If you want a person in the room, there is an AI Tools Report + Strategy Call at £299.99 inc VAT: the same report, a 60-minute call, then the report refined after it. Each step is credited against the next, so the report fee comes off a build if you decide to have the quick wins done for you. Report prices include VAT; build and retainer prices exclude it.
If you would rather do the work yourself, read how to run your own AI audit first — it is a fair comparison and it tells you plainly when buying ours is not worth it.
Questions, or want a tool we don't have yet? Email hello@grafto.co.uk — a real person replies.