Every AI consulting engagement we run is fixed-scope, fixed-price. That's not a marketing line; it's a deliberate engagement model because the alternative — time and materials — is where most SMB AI deployments go sideways. This post is about what the model actually covers, what it explicitly doesn't, and why it works for small and mid-sized businesses.
What fixed-scope, fixed-price covers
For a typical voice agent, document automation, or intake and scheduling engagement, the price includes:
- Scoping and design work.
- Call-flow, workflow, or document-flow design.
- Integration with your existing phone, calendar, CRM, or practice management system.
- Build of the AI layer.
- Staff enablement.
- Pilot and cutover.
- First 30 days of tuning against real traffic.
What it doesn't cover
- Third-party platform costs — your Twilio, RingCentral, OpenAI API, Azure OpenAI, or AWS bills pass through directly.
- Scope changes you add mid-engagement. If you change the scope, we re-scope and re-quote before doing the work.
- Ongoing support after the first 30 days of tuning. That's priced separately as a monthly run-rate if you want it.
- Integration with systems we didn't scope up front. Adding a third PM system mid-build is a re-scope.
Why this model works for SMBs
- Predictability. You know the cost before you sign. No time-and-materials meters.
- Alignment. We're incented to finish on time. A time-and-materials vendor has the opposite incentive.
- Scope discipline. Fixed-price forces both sides to be specific about what's in and out of scope. That conversation is where most projects succeed or fail.
How we scope
A typical scoping conversation is 45 minutes. We walk through the workflow, map the integration points, identify the compliance posture, and commit to a specific price and timeline in writing within a week. If we can't confidently fix-price the work, we'll say so and propose a small paid discovery phase instead.
When fixed-price doesn't work
For truly exploratory engagements — "we want to figure out what AI could do for us" — we run a short, fixed-price discovery sprint first. That produces a scoped, fixed-price build proposal. It never turns into an open- ended meter.
If you want to see the model in action, scope a 45-minute conversation.