¶ Service 02
AI Consulting.
Custom AI for SMB founders.
Custom AI work for SMBs. AI strategy, workflow automation, RAG agents, self-improving systems, team training. Three packages from $2,500, founder-delivered, final scope set on the call. If your AI question is bigger than “make me citable,” it lands here.
Key takeaways
Updated August 2026· Jake Pereira, M.Sc. Economics & Finance
- Free: one workflow built for you before you commit to anything.
- Starter, from $2,500: a few automations off your plate, delivered async.
- Growth, from $7,500: an AI assistant grounded in your own documents, plus a bi-weekly steering cadence.
- Premium, from $20,000: a self-improving agentic system with a dashboard, and me on call.
- Modeled payback: on the illustrative model below, which is not a typical result, a Starter engagement recovers its cost in about seven weeks, before any ongoing support retainer. Yours depends on your inputs.
AI consulting for small businesses at SABS starts at $2,500 for the Starter package. Growth starts at $7,500 and includes a RAG agent trained on your own data. Premium starts at $20,000 and includes a self-improving agentic system with a personalized dashboard. Every price is a starting point. The final number depends on how many workflows are in scope, and it is written down before you commit.
Three packages
What each package costs.
Each one includes the last.
Every package reads the same way: the problem it solves, what I build, and what you walk away with. Prices below are starting points. Final scope is set on the call, so you only pay for the work you actually need.
- 01Starter
Starter
from $2,500
async delivery · final scope set on the call
- Problem
- You know AI could take work off your plate. You do not know which work, or where to start.
- Solution
- AI audits of how you work now. Tailored automations built for the tasks that repeat. Delivered async, no standing meetings to sit through.
- Result
- A short list of automations running against real work, and hours back on the tasks you used to do by hand.
Scope my Starter planIncludes
- AI audits of your current workflows
- Tailored workflow automations
- Vendor and tool selection
- Async delivery
- 02Growth
Growth
from $7,500
bi-weekly calls · final scope set on the call
- Problem
- The quick automations helped. Now you want AI that knows your business and does more than one task.
- Solution
- A RAG agent grounded in your own documents. Customized multi-step workflows. Content creation. Specialized agents for specific jobs. We meet every two weeks to steer.
- Result
- AI that answers from your data, drafts your content, and runs workflows end to end, on a cadence that keeps it moving.
Scope my Growth planEverything in Starter, plus
- RAG agent on your data
- Customized workflows
- Content creation
- Specialized agents
- Website audit
- UX/UI design
- AI team training
- Bi-weekly calls
- 03Premium
Premium
from $20,000
on-call meetings · final scope set on the call
- Problem
- You want AI that improves on its own, and a clear view of what it is doing at any moment.
- Solution
- A personalized dashboard over your AI systems. An agentic framework that measures itself and self-improves. Loop-engineering so the system sharpens each cycle. I am on call when you need me.
- Result
- AI that tightens its own loops and reports its own results. The most hands-on tier, for work that cannot wait.
Scope my Premium planEverything in Growth, plus
- Personalized dashboard
- Agentic self-improving framework
- Loop-engineering
- On-call meetings
Not sure which one · book the call and we settle it together
Inside Premium
The self-improving system,
running, not slideware.
A walkthrough of the actual dashboard behind the Premium package: live usage tracking, an editable agent framework, and a knowledge graph where expert agents debate and rewrite their own doctrine. This is what “self-improving” means in practice.
How working together goes
One call to shipped.
Five steps.
The same path every engagement runs, whatever package you land on. No SDR, no handoff, no surprise scope. You always know what happens next.
- 01
Book the 30-min call
Tell me what you are trying to do with AI. No prep, no deck, no obligation.
- 02
We audit your current workflows
I map where AI fits and where it does not. Honest about both, out loud, on the call.
- 03
Scoped proposal with fixed deliverables
A written scope. Fixed deliverables, a named package, and a clear line on exactly what ships.
- 04
Build and ship
I build and hand off. Cadence follows your package: async on Starter, bi-weekly on Growth, on-call on Premium.
- 05
Iterate and expand
We tighten what is running and add what is next. On Premium, the system self-improves on its own loop.
The honest comparison
The packages, an agency,
and doing nothing.
No spin. Here is how founder-delivered packages stack up against hiring an agency and against the option most people actually pick, which is putting it off.
| The packages | Hiring an agency | Doing nothing | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who does the work | The founder who scoped it, start to ship. | A junior you never met, three accounts deep. | You, at 11pm, still copy-pasting. |
| Speed | Async or bi-weekly. Work ships between calls. | A kickoff deck lands in week three. | Next quarter. Same as last quarter. |
| What you get | Automations and agents running against real work. | A strategy slide and a retainer invoice. | The same manual tasks, on repeat. |
| Cost shape | Scoped to the work. You see it before you commit. | A monthly retainer whether they ship or not. | Free, until you count the hours. |
| AI depth | RAG, specialized agents, self-improving loops. | Whatever their one AI hire read last week. | A ChatGPT tab and good intentions. |
| When it improves | Every cycle. Premium tightens its own loop. | When you email and ask. | It does not. |
The ROI math, shown
What the return
actually looks like.
I am not going to promise you a number I cannot know. Here is the arithmetic instead, with every input visible, so you can put your own figures in and see what falls out.
- People doing the task
- 2
- Hours each, per week
- 6
- Loaded hourly cost
- $45
- Share the automation absorbs
- 70%
2 people × 6 hrs/week × $45/hr × 70% = $378/week, or about $19,650 a year.
Against a Starter engagement at $2,500, that model pays back in roughly seven weeks.
Illustrative model, not a guarantee · your inputs decide your result
Start at zero
One workflow,
built free.
Before any package, any invoice, any commitment: tell me one task that eats your week and I will build the automation for it. You keep it either way. One workflow, so it stays a real free thing rather than unpaid scoping for a big project.
Why this practice
Measured, not claimed.
Most SMB-focused AI consulting is either too generic (a 90-day “digital transformation” deck that says nothing) or too enterprise (a Big-4 firm charging enterprise rates for the same deck). SABS sits in between: founder-delivered, three named packages, no SDR, no junior analyst.
The work is delivered by Jake Pereira, M.Sc. Economics & Finance. The frameworks are built on machine-learning fundamentals and measured with the statistical methods econometrics uses: bootstrapped estimates and difference-in-differences against a pre-automation baseline, so results are shown rather than asserted.
I also publish what did not work, which is rarer in this market than it should be: the integration that broke in week two, the AI tool I never opened again, and what I rejected after the agent approved it. The audit habit that catches those failures is the same one you are paying for.
Before you book
AI consulting questions,
answered straight.
- How much does AI consulting cost for a small business?
- At SABS, Starter starts at $2,500, Growth at $7,500, and Premium at $20,000. Those are entry points, not fixed fees. The final number depends on how many workflows are in scope and how messy the systems are underneath. Before any of them, one workflow gets built free. How those compare to market rates, and how to model your own payback.
- Is there a free option before I pay anything?
- Yes. I build one workflow for you free, before any package. You tell me the task, I build the automation, you keep it whether or not you hire me. It is capped at one workflow so it stays genuinely free rather than turning into unpaid scoping for a large project.
- What ROI should I actually expect?
- Honest answer: it depends entirely on how much repeated manual work you have, and nobody who has not seen your operation can promise you a number. What I can do is show the arithmetic. Two people spending six hours a week each on a task that costs $45 an hour loaded, with an automation absorbing 70% of it, recovers about $19,650 a year, which pays back a $2,500 Starter engagement in around seven weeks. Substitute your own numbers; the model is only as good as its inputs.
- How long before something is actually running?
- Starter work ships async, usually inside two to three weeks of the scope being signed. Growth runs on a bi-weekly cadence, so the first agent or workflow is typically live within a month and the rest builds out from there. Premium is on-call and continuous. Nothing here involves a three-week kickoff deck.
- Which package fits me?
- Start with the problem, not the tier. If you want a few automations off your plate, that is Starter. If you want AI grounded in your data plus a steering cadence, that is Growth. If you want a self-improving system and me on call, that is Premium. We settle it on the call.
- What happens on the first call?
- Thirty minutes. You tell me what you are trying to do with AI. I audit where it fits out loud, flag where it does not, and tell you which package matches. You leave with a clear next step, not a pitch.
- How is this different from Citably?
- Citably is the productized GEO service for B2B SaaS: getting your site cited by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. AI Consulting covers custom AI work, for any SMB. If your question is bigger than "make me citable," it lands here. Citably lives at citably.co.
- Could I just do this myself with ChatGPT?
- For a single task, often yes, and I will tell you so on the call rather than sell you a package. Where it stops working is anything that has to run unattended, touch more than one system, or fail safely when something upstream changes. That is the gap worth paying for. If your problem is really "I have not sat down and learned the tools yet," you do not need a consultant.
- Does this only work for certain industries?
- The work is workflow-shaped rather than industry-shaped: customer support triage, lead intake and follow-up, invoice and document handling, content drafting, reporting. Those exist in nearly every small business. Where industry does matter is compliance: anything touching health records or regulated financial data changes what can be automated and how, and that gets flagged on the call before it gets scoped.
- What happens if the automation breaks?
- It will, eventually. An API changes, a vendor deprecates something, an edge case arrives. That is why silent failure is the thing I design against first: a workflow that quietly stops is worse than one that never existed, because you keep trusting it. I have written publicly about getting exactly this wrong. Starter includes handover notes so you can see what broke; Growth and Premium include the cadence to fix it.
In plain English
What each package
actually builds.
No jargon. The ladder from Starter to Premium, then three examples of the exact thing that gets built.
The ladder
- 01Starter
A few automations off your plate. Async delivery.
- 02Growth
AI grounded in your data, plus a steering cadence.
- 03Premium
A self-improving system, and me on call.
AI assistant on your data
Your documents
We teach the AI to read them
Your team asks questions in plain English
Answers come back with sources
LinkedIn outreach on autopilot
List of your ideal customers
Personalized messages drafted for you
You approve with one click
Meetings land on your calendar
Automation workflow
Something happens (new lead, new invoice)
The busywork happens automatically
Result lands in your inbox or CRM
Same Calendly as Citably
Bring the actual problem.
We scope from there.
Tell me what you’re trying to do with AI. If it’s GEO for B2B SaaS, you’ll leave the call with a Citably tier scoped. If it’s anything else AI, you’ll leave with a Starter, Growth, or Premium package scoped. 30 minutes.