How we price a £1,500 AI audit (and why we built it this way)

The gap we're closing

54% of UK SMEs say they're using AI. Only 16% have deliberately deployed it with a defined business purpose. The distance between those two numbers is mostly one person on ChatGPT, with nothing else in the business actually changing — no process rebuilt, no time actually saved, no number anyone could point to afterwards.

That gap isn't really a technology problem. Most owner-managers we talk to aren't short of enthusiasm for AI — they're short of the time to work out where it would actually help, and short of confidence that a consultant won't sell them something oversized for what they need. The unglamorous admin — quoting, missed calls, paperwork, bookings — is exactly the kind of work that eats a week without ever presenting itself as "the AI problem." It just looks like Tuesday.

Why we start with an audit, not a pitch

We could sell straight into a build. We don't, because a build sold before anyone has properly looked at how a business actually works is a guess dressed up as a solution — and it's usually the business that pays for that guess being wrong.

So the first engagement is always the same: one to two weeks looking at how the business actually runs, ending in three to five quantified opportunities set out in plain English, with the one worth starting first made explicit. For a trades or construction business that's very often the phone — see the brief on what a missed call actually costs. For manufacturing and engineering it's more often the quotation — turning a specification into an accurate quote, drafted automatically for someone to check rather than compile from scratch. Picture a typical week at either kind of business: a handful of calls missed while someone's on the tools, a stack of paperwork waiting for a quiet moment that doesn't arrive, a quote redrafted twice because the first version missed a line. None of that is a fabricated client result — it's the ordinary shape of the work the audit exists to find and put a number on for your business specifically.

Why the fee is fixed — and refundable

The audit costs £1,500, fixed, agreed before we start. That's deliberate. Agency day-rates and open-ended "discovery" scopes put the risk on you — you don't know what it'll cost until it's costing you. A fixed fee means you know the number before you commit to anything, and it's why the audit sits at £1,500 rather than at the £2,450–£4,500 a comparable fixed-fee audit often starts at.

The refund guarantee is the part that matters more than the price. The fee is credited in full against a subsequent build — and refunded entirely if we cannot find at least three opportunities that would pay for themselves. That isn't a marketing line. It means our incentive during those two weeks is to find real opportunities, not to justify a fee we've already been paid regardless of what we find.

What happens after the audit

If the numbers add up, the next step is a Build: a single solution, built and configured on your own accounts, live within weeks, at a fixed £3,000–£6,000 depending on scope — never a day-rate, never a year-long project. After that, an optional Retainer at £450 a month covers ongoing monitoring, refinement and quarterly counsel on what's worth considering next, with no lock-in and thirty days' notice whenever you want out.

Every stage runs on the same principles: your accounts, your keys, your data, always; a human signs off everything before it reaches you; and if we ever part ways, you keep the whole of it — every account, every workflow, every record. Nothing switches off because we're no longer involved.

Start with what you actually have

If you're a manufacturing or engineering business in the West Midlands, it's also worth knowing that Made Smarter West Midlands offers grants of up to £20,000, match-funded at 50%, for adopting AI and digital tools — we'll help you work out whether the funded route or a fixed-fee build with us is the right starting point; the two aren't mutually exclusive. Beyond data, cost, jobs and lock-in, we've also written up honest answers to the questions owner-managers ask most before working with an AI consultancy.