Say you've decided an AI project is worth doing, maybe sorting the quote requests that pile up in your inbox. Now you get three suggestions in one week. A friend knows a freelancer. A firm sends a proposal with a project manager and a weekly status call. Your business partner thinks you should just hire someone.
Any of the three can build it. What changes is who you'll be talking to, how you pay, and what happens the week someone is out.
Hire an AI consultant for one defined job
You deal with the person doing the work, so the person you explain the job to is the one who builds it. Upwork's hiring page says AI consultants generally charge $35 to $60 an hour, with the most experienced at $100 and up. If you want a plan before any build, Upwork's project table prices an AI readiness audit at $1,500 to $4,000 and a strategy and roadmap at $4,000 to $10,000.
The catch is that it's one person. If they're sick or booked, the work waits. Before you start, ask where the code lives and whether another developer could pick it up from the notes.
Hire an AI agency when several things must move at once
An agency sells a team and a process. Clutch's pricing page puts the usual AI development project it reviews at $10,000 to $49,999, with a typical timeline of 10 months. The average is $120,594, well above that range. What a team can give you is parallel work, and someone else who can pick it up if one engineer leaves.
Before you sign, ask who'll be on your weekly call and who'll write the code, and whether that's the same person. A team brings coordination with it. That earns its keep when three things are moving at once, and it's mostly overhead when the job is one inbox.
Hire an engineer only for years of full-time work
The Bureau of Labor Statistics put a software developer's median pay at $135,980 in May 2025. Pay is 70% of what a private employer spends on a worker, so the full cost is closer to $194,000 a year, and that's developers in general, not AI specialists. You'd also be their manager. If nobody else on staff reads code, nobody can tell you whether the work is good, and when they leave, what they knew leaves with them.
The part AI adds to the decision
An AI feature isn't finished when it ships. A wrong answer reads exactly like a right one, so someone has to keep checking what it says on real messages, and the systems it reads from keep getting updated. Whoever you pick, ask who does that checking in month six and what it costs. Have the logins and the code registered to your company, not to whoever built it.
And sometimes the answer is none of the three. If the task is a feature in software you already pay for, an afternoon of setup is the whole project. How AI can help a small business covers what to check in the software you already have.
Where I fit
I'm a consultant: a solo practice, just me. My roadmap is $1,500 · ~2 weeks · credited in full if you continue, and after that it's currently $5,500 a month for one build at a time. Pause or cancel anytime. You own everything. I'm the wrong pick if you need several builds moving at the same time; an agency's team can run them side by side. If you need a couple of hours of advice, an hourly consultant costs less than a month with me. Prices for all three are compared in what an AI consultant costs.