What AI actually costs a 30-person firm
Nobody publishes this, so here it is.
The numbers below are what the market asks in Singapore and Australia, gathered from suppliers' own published pages. Treat them as the top of the range rather than the middle: these are marketing pages, and marketing pages inflate. Knock a quarter off and you are closer to what deals actually close at.
The four things you can buy
A working session, S$500 to S$1,500. Ninety minutes to half a day, one workflow built live. Its real job is settling the argument in the room about whether any of this applies to your business specifically. Cheap enough to be a decision nobody needs to defend.
An audit, S$2,500 to S$8,000. Days inside the business pricing your processes against what your own people cost. Below S$2,500 nobody is spending real time on site. Above S$8,000 you are usually buying a strategy deck. It should be credited against whatever you buy next; if it is not, you are the profit centre.
A monthly retainer, S$3,000 to S$15,000. The widest band and the one worth understanding, because two very different products share it. At the bottom, someone maintains what already exists. Retainers that build something new every month start around S$6,000 and run to S$25,000.
A fractional AI engineer, US$6,000 to US$18,000 a month. For eight to twenty hours a week. Worth quoting because it is the honest comparison for any monthly arrangement, and it reframes the part-time objection: this is what part-time costs everywhere.
A full-time AI lead, S$150,000 to S$250,000 a year once you include employer costs. Plus roughly four months to find one, during which nothing happens.
The comparison that actually decides it
Most firms of this size are not choosing between suppliers. They are choosing between a supplier and a hire, and the hire looks cheaper per month than it is.
A S$180,000 salary is S$15,000 a month before you count recruitment, equipment, management time or the four-month gap. Against that, a retainer in the S$6,000 to S$8,000 range is not the expensive option. It is roughly half, available next week, and it does not become a redundancy conversation if the strategy changes.
The genuine argument for hiring is permanence. Somebody in the building all day, whose only job this is. That is worth real money, and if you are large enough to keep them busy and senior enough to manage them, hire. Firms under about a hundred people usually discover they have half a job, which is how good AI hires end up doing general IT within a year.
What the price does not tell you
Two suppliers at the same monthly number can be selling opposite things, and the invoice looks identical.
Ask where the work lives. Accounts in your name, billed to you, or accounts they own and rent to you? Ask who can change it in six months. Ask what happens to it if you stop paying. The answers separate a retainer that leaves capability behind from one that leaves a dependency, and there is no way to tell from the number.
Our own view, for the record: we price the retainer at S$6,500 a month on a twelve-month term. That sits mid-band rather than at the bottom, deliberately, because the bottom of that band is where maintenance sits and this ships something new every month.
A rough rule
If the work you are considering fixing does not cost you at least three times the monthly fee, do not fix it yet. Find the one that does.
That rule disqualifies most of what firms initially want to work on, which is the point. The exciting process and the expensive process are rarely the same process.