How to Price AI Automations Without Undercharging (My Exact Formula)

If your client is burning $52k a year on a task you can automate, and you're quoting them three hundred bucks because that's what your time is "worth" — we need to talk.

This is the pricing conversation I wish someone had sat me down for three years ago. In this ep I break down the exact framework I use (and that I had to be walked into by my business advisor Peta from The Professional Babe) for pricing automations and AI consulting based on the result you create — not the hours you spend wiring it up.

Inside this episode:

• Why hourly pricing quietly punishes you for being good at your job
• The mindset shift from "what does my time cost" to "what does their pain cost"
• The four discovery call questions that surface the numbers you need to quote
• The actual formula — hours saved × hourly rate × 52 = annual savings — and where to land your fee inside that
• A worked example you can copy-paste into your next proposal
• Word-for-word proposal copy that frames your fee against their savings
• How to handle "that seems expensive" without flinching, discounting, or over-explaining
• The Phase 1 Discovery trick that gets you paid for the thinking (and filters tyre-kickers)
• A neurodivergent-friendly note on the urge to apologise for your price (and the silence that does the work for you)

This ep was sparked by a question from Georgina inside my Skool community Wright Mode, with a smart addition from Mariana on minimum fees — both shouted out throughout.

If you've moved from hourly to project work and the pricing question is wrecking your brain — this one's for you.

0:00 - Why hourly pricing is bleeding you money
1:42 - The mindset shift that changed how I quote
7:58 - 4 discovery call questions that unlock your real fee
12:37 - The formula + a $52,000 worked example
16:24 - Proposal copy you can steal (+ handling "that's expensive")
21:10 - AI Confession Booth
22:47 - Your one-task experiment for this week

Join Wright Mode on Skool — the community where this conversation started and where we workshop pricing, builds, and funnels every week with zero AI bro energy. 👉 https://www.skool.com/wright-mode-membership/about

• Want to work together? Check out my offerings at Wright Mode
• Connect with me on Instagram → @wright_mode

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Picture this. You've got a client on a discovery call. They're telling you about this manual task that their team does every single week. let's say it takes them 10 hours a week and at a hundred bucks an hour, that's a thousand dollars a week, which is roughly $52,000 a year. And they are quite literally. Setting on fire, doing something an AI workflow could do while they are making coffee. And you, the wildly talented automation specialist who can actually fix this. You are sitting there doing the mental maths about how many hours it'll take you to build this thing for them, and you quote them. A thousand bucks, maybe 2000, because that's what your time is worth, right? That's how much time it takes you to build the thing. Wrong. That is freelancer maths, and it is the single fastest way to burn out undercharge and resent every single client that you take on. So this is the episode that I wish someone had sat me down and recorded three years ago when I first started out. I'm gonna give you the formula that I use. In this episode, and that I had to be walked into by my business advisor 'cause I was literally doing that too. And, this will help you work out pricing for automations and AI consulting in a way that doesn't punish you for being fast. It doesn't apologise for your expertise and it will help your client say yes faster and you will feel comfortable charging the correct prices for the ROI that you were delivering for the client. Alright, let's get into it. So I've just come back from almost two weeks of holiday in Bali, which we had never been before. And it was so good, like amazing. I was a little bit anti barley before we went. I think I just expected like Aussie bogans everywhere. And it was not like that at all. The people are beautiful. the food, oh my god. And I actually. Came back from holidays, feeling like I'd had a holiday. 10 out of 10 recommend. Alright, let's get into the actual episode now. this episode exists because of a question that I got inside my school community, by a legend named Georgina. And shout out to Mariana, who jumped in as well with her own pricing wisdom. So I answered this in my community. But I also said to Georgina, I will make a podcast episode on this because we can go deep and I know that there are so many people out there who want this answered as well. So Georgina asked, and I'm paraphrasing here. She's like, I'm pretty sure I'm undercharging. I've just moved from hourly to project work. I don't know what to quote. and I, yeah, I need some help working this out. Rita, I have been Georgina, I still struggle with this. so I guess I'm making this episode so that it will help you, and also kind of share some of the insights that I've learned from doing this for three years now. So here's what you're gonna get in this episode. The mindset shift that I had to make before I could actually charge. Properly and why hourly pricing is quietly killing your business, particularly in the age of AI where we can do things faster. I do not want you to be punished for those skills. I'm also gonna get into the four questions that I ask now on every single discovery call because they give me the data that I need to quote properly and then the formula, because there is a formula and it is very good because when we start feeling a bit. Funny about what we're quoting. We can go back to the formula, and then I'll give you an example. so you can basically copy and paste that into your next proposal. And also how to handle the. Objections. I guess the, oh, that seems expensive moment without flinching or dropping your price, because we don't wanna do that. All right. You may wanna take notes in this one. we are gonna do a little bit of maths today, but it is easy. I'm not a maths girly. so yeah, don't fear that. Here we go. All right, so your first thing, and. This is the bit I guess I'm gonna need you to just sit with, even if your brain resists it. Hourly pricing punishes you for being good at your job. That's it. And if you use AI or automations to become more efficient, you should not get punished for that because at the end of the day, we are delivering an outcome to the client. So the better you get, the faster you get, the less you earn when you charge hourly. So every skill upgrade, every new tool that you master, every workflow. If you are charging hourly, you are literally losing money even though you know you could be more consistent, and provide a much better service to your clients. So. We wanna stop doing that. The other trap, and this one is so sneaky, is thinking that you need to price off how long it takes you to build the thing. Or this automation takes me about two hours to build, so I'll charge two hours worth. Maybe I'll add in a little buffer, if I get stuck. I did that for years, honestly. So I would build something in an afternoon and it might save the client like 40 hours over like a quarter. and I'd charge them what I felt was fair for my time. and. It is. Yeah, I, there, I still think about some of the clients, like I have created incredible AI products for them and I charge some of these people like $800, for a build that I found out later was making them seven figures. I kid you not, so I wasn't pricing. My work properly. and yeah, it just made me resent the work itself. look, this is a skill that I have developed. some of this comes back to confidence, but a lot of it, especially if you are neurodivergent, it's like this honesty reflex, like. The inability to look someone in the eye and say, this costs $5,000. When in your head you are like, but it only takes me two hours to make. This is a lovely trait for friendships, but it is terrible when you are trying to grow your business. so the reframe, is you are not being paid for the time it takes you to build the thing you are being paid for the result that the build creates the outcome that the. Gives your client, and this is the same way you know, a surgeon or a specialist doesn't bill you for the 45 minutes that they're doing the thing. They bill you for the outcome. They bill you for, not dying. That's the value. When I started working with my business advisor, Peter, from the Professional Babe, she, yeah, we worked through pricing together, and she got me to stop pricing off vibes. That was a huge up level for me. And once it clicked, every single. Quote I sent from there, got bigger. and weirdly more of them got approved. And that's the same with my consulting. I started with them being, I think they were like $300 and now I'm charging like $1,300 hourly. and like that is good for me and it is good for my clients because I. Have the ability now to spend more time, more quality time working on that. Consult with them. Rather than trying to do like 10 a week to make that same money, and spreading myself thin. So that's the mind shift mindset shift pricing is not about you. Pricing is about what your work does for your client. Now, if we are not pricing off time, what are we pricing off? Because I know some of you are like, great brook, cool. Love the vibes. But what's the actual number? Like and need that number. So that's where our discovery call comes in. So when we're on our discovery call, the whole point of asking questions is simple. Like you cannot price on value if you don't know what their value is. So you need numbers to be able to anchor that proposal back to, and the client almost never volunteers them because. They've probably never sat down and worked it out. So your job as the strategist in the room, which is what you are, by the way, not just the builder, you are the strategist. So your job is to ask the questions that surface those numbers. And there are four questions that I ask. there could be a fifth if you're feeling a bit spicy or confident. so let's get into them. So question one. How many hours a week does this task currently take you or your team? That's straightforward, but here's what actually happens. So most people will lowball it, because they haven't actually measured it. or they might just have a guess, like, oh, this takes us maybe six hours a week. What I want you to do is. Dig deeper into that. So follow up, okay. Walk me through those steps. What do you actually do? And as they talk, you'll hear them go like, oh, okay. So I pull that into a spreadsheet, then I check my inbox, then I copy it into a CRM. Oh, my team member, she does the second check. or, and then we gotta slack the team or, and then on Fridays we do this. and then you'll see very quickly that often that number is a lot higher than what they've initially even thought about. and so walk the client through that and then write that number down. Question two, what's the hourly rate? Of the person doing this task, and if it is the business owner doing it, be like, what do you charge your clients or what do you pay yourself per hour? Or what is even your dream hourly rate? if you've worked that out and if it's a team member, you wanna ask like, what's their fully loaded cost per hour? So this isn't just hourly rate, you know, that's. Super tools, all of that calculated into it. And if they don't know, you can use a sensible estimate based on the role, but they should know really. and so this is the number that turns the hours into like a dollar figure that they can start to see. And this number is the one that actually matters. Question three. So this is what happens when this task doesn't get done or, there's mistakes, it gets done badly. I like this one a lot because it surfaces the hidden costs. So, you know, it could be the cost that the lead didn't get followed up, or the invoice was sent out three weeks late, or the client who churned because their onboarding was a mess. you know, are you doing admin on the weekends? That sort of stuff. So these costs are often, often bigger than that hourly number. and they're the story that you're also gonna weave into the proposal. Question four. If we could get you back those hours, what would you actually do with them? I actually love this one so much because it's an emotional anchor. I work more, I'd sleep, I'd play with my kids. that's a big cost saving for us. I'd launch an offer that I've been sitting on that I just don't have time to do. I'd go for a walk, I'd go to the gym. So, that answer can help form that opening line of your proposal. and that really does kind of tell the story of the opportunity and the ROI for the client. and then there is a bonus fifth question. and this one is really good because again, it starts to get the client to think about not the cost of the build or the investment, but the cost of not doing it. So what. Is it costing you to not fix this for another six months? this is really good and quick. Mariana, shout out. She jumped in on Georgina's thread and said something really smart. She has a minimum that she charges that always includes the research and access. To Tech Stack, which is Chef's Kiss because it means she doesn't do that work for free. We'll come back to that minimum fee idea, a bit later. but let's move on. So you've asked those questions, you've got the numbers, and now let's put that into this formula for the proposal all. So here is the formula that you can use. Look at hours saved per week times by their hourly rate. Times by 52 weeks equals annual savings. Then you price your service at somewhere between 10 and 30% of that first year saving. That's it. So that's the whole formula. So let me walk you through that now. So you've got a client on a discovery call. You've asked the four questions, and here's what you found out. So they're spending 10 hours a week on this task. The hourly rate of the person doing it is a hundred dollars. Okay? So we pop that into the formula, 10 hours times a hundred dollars. Times 52 weeks. And so that's what, $52,000 a year. That's how much this one task is currently costing their business. and if you are quoting like a thousand bucks for that, you can see the gap. Let's say realistically that it's going to cut that task in half because we're not promising zero. So let's say that's like $26,000 a year that is saved. So your fee should be somewhere between 10 and 30% of that first year savings. So we are looking at a range of 2000. $600 at the bottom up to, almost $8,000 at the top. So your personal sweet spot for a build at this level is probably between five to $10,000. Why? Because I'm also factoring in that I'm saving them the cost of rebuilding this when someone else, someone cheaper, tries to do it and doesn't do it properly. I'm also factoring in. The fix it later cost when you know their weird version that they've tried to use or create themselves breaks. I'm also factoring in the opportunity cost of those hours, which as we said, isn't really doing, you know, more work. It's those, I guess the qualitative things that sanity, family time, gym time, all of that. Quick sanity. Check on your number. Ask yourself this. Does this price pay for itself inside the first quarter of using it? If the answer is yes, you are in no brainer territory. That's where you wanna live. Okay. And for those of you who are like, why only 10 to 30% and not higher, there's two reasons for this under 10% and you are genuinely like leaving money on the table. And we wanna run a profitable business here, over 30%. And the pays for itself in year one story is a bit harder to sell. Because you are eating too much of the savings before the client sees any upside. so that's why there is that kind of sweet spot there. Now, side note, for anyone who's like, Brooke, I don't even do builds anymore. What do I do? Me neither. To be fair, I may, I mostly do paid consults now as research and scoping. And then I will hand that off to a subcontractor or one of my referral partners so they can handle the build themselves. But the formula still applies. your pricing, the thinking, the strategy, the roadmap, like all of that knowledge that you have is so valuable. The clicking and building is cheap. If we are to just be like, oh, this build takes two hours, 10 hours, whatever it is, but it's the knowledge of like knowing what is gonna work. What is the strategy that is worth five figures. All right, so we've got the number now. Now we have to put it into a proposal and we have to make this sound like the no-brainer that it is. So the client reads this and is like, absolutely yes, go ahead. So this paragraph that lives in every single one of my proposals now in some form or another is this. So you are currently spending around 10 hours a week on this at roughly $100 an hour. That's about $52,000 a year. I'll build you something that cuts that in half My fee is. X six and a half thousand dollars, which means that the build pays for itself in about six weeks. Awesome. So notice what's not in there, your hourly rate, how long the build takes you, how many Zaps or NAN or Airtable bases or make scenarios are involved not in there. Client doesn't need to know that it's their numbers, their savings, their payback, period. You are the expert in the room who's gonna show them that the math is already done and you are going to build that system for them. Now, Georgina, back to your question because this is super important. So you mentioned that sometimes clients ask if something is possible and you go off and have a play with it to confirm which takes time, which you don't always charge for. And that is a huge, huge leak. And that is something that when I first started, I also struggled with because I was like, I don't even know if this is possible. and so I really struggled with that. So the fix for that is phase one. Research and scoping, so write that into your proposal template right now. Phase one is always research and scoping paid upfront, credited toward the build fee if you want to. You don't have to do that. That can also just standalone and then the build it sits on the back of that. So a couple of reasons this works so well is you get paid for your thinking, your research, your scope, scoping, like you should be paid for that. That is also saving the client a lot of time, money, effort. It also filters out tyre kickers instantly, so anyone who won't pay that amount to see if this build is actually possible. Was probably never gonna sign on anyways. and number three, it positions you as the strategist, not just like the builder. So that changes the dynamic, because you are like, I need to look at this properly. I need to research this. I need to scope this, and you need to pay me for that. So, that could sit somewhere between 500 and up to about $2,000 for the discovery phase, depending on the complexity. for higher ticket builds. it could be even more, but never, ever zero. Like you need to be paid for this. and this is where Mariana's minimum rule kind of bolts onto this. So have a floor, so below that floor you don't work. Full stop. so you know. That is like you will be paid a minimum of, I don't know, whatever, two hours of your work is worth, something like that. That's your flaw, because you don't wanna be doing work for free because you start to resent your business and also the clients as well. All right, so let's get into the pushback now. because you will get clients who are like, oh, this is a bit expensive. so here's what you have to practise and not do. You do not flinch and you do not immediately discount. you don't start justifying, you know, oh, it takes about 20 hours to build this. And then there's the testing and the qa. I want you to just. Stop, take your breath and then say something like, totally fair question. let's look at it against what this task is currently costing you. So you mentioned, you know, you do this 10 hours a week at a hundred dollars, that's $52,000 a year. My fee is less than seven weeks of that spend. After that, it essentially runs for free. That is your return on investment working right there. The number doesn't change. All you are doing is framing it for them so they can actually understand the ROI on that. you're not defending your price. You are just reminding them of their pain in dollars and letting that price look small against that. Like, oh, okay, yes, this is a no brainer. And if they come back with, oh, can we do it cheaper? You can come back with something like. We can absolutely scope it smaller. Which piece of the savings would you like to delay capturing? That is a beautiful sentence. You can take that, put it on your fridge practise saying that, and also learn to sit with the discomfort of that. And this is something that she kind of coached me on, is just like, let that land with them. All right, so we have covered a lot in today's episode. Let's jump in now for our AI confession booth. alright, so I guess my AI confession booth this week is, I definitely before the holidays was like, oh man, I am going way too hard and fast. Yeah, Claude Code is super addictive for anyone who's in that now. and yeah, I was just like, woo, I feel really like unbalanced. And the last two episodes of this podcast have really spoken to that. but the upside is having that holiday was such a good reset. And so I am really gonna try and hold these boundaries now. I've started batching content, which is, really, oh my god. Everyone says it. And I only, I'm only doing a week at a time, but oh my God, to not pull out my phone multiple times a day to film. Amazing. Alright, now you are not, you are not another to-do for this week. So I want you to go back to your last three. Proposals, or the next one that you're about to send. And for each one, I want you to try and calculate the annual cost of the client for the, like that you're working with or that you quoted. and if you don't know that, then that is I guess your learning, that you were going to start asking those questions on those discovery calls. and if you can work that out, I want you to check was your fee under 10% of their first year of savings? If yes, you were underpricing. and, you know, don't feel bad about that. We've all been there. just notice that and improve, like just. Stretch yourself to work it out now using the formula. and yeah, just I guess know that moving forward, that is how you go, are going to price them now. and look, this whole episode exists because Georgina asked this question inside my school community, right mode. and it's one of the reasons that I love this community so much, because it's full of people like Georgina, Mariana, There's builders, strategists, founders, and you know, you can ask these questions in a safe space, without any tech, bro, AI energy insight. So if you wanna come out, hang out in there, learn swap proposals, steal that discovery, call, script, whatever, and workshop pricing with people who get it, as well as learn, AI tools and automations. I will link the. how to join in the show notes below. and I'm in there every single day. Like I love serving that community so much. And if this episode was useful, you know what to do. Share it with a friend who could use this. and also please make sure you like and subscribe. It helps my channel so much and I will see you on the next episode.