Guide · Fixed-price AI automation
A fixed price covers one agreed process taken from free discovery to live: the written proposal, the build, a test run on your real data, training, documentation and handover. As of October 2026 most first projects land between NZ$500 and $15,000 excluding GST. Hosting, AI usage and any change to the agreed scope sit outside it, and you're told those numbers before you sign.
A fixed price buys one agreed process, working live in your business, for a number you know before anything is built. That covers the proposal, the build, a test run on your real data, training for whoever will use it, documentation and handover. Discovery before it is free.
What it doesn't cover is anything that keeps going after go-live: hosting and support, AI usage, and the subscriptions you already pay for. Those are separate, small, and quoted alongside the build so there's no surprise in month two. All prices on this page are as of October 2026 and exclude GST.
The range depends on the kind of work, and the bottom of each one is a real project, not a teaser. These are the same ranges as the pricing page, as of October 2026.
| Kind of work | Fixed price | Typical time | What that looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Automation across the tools you already run | NZ$500 to $5,000 | Under a week to 4 weeks | Supplier invoices read and coded into Xero, enquiries triaged and drafted, overdue payments chased. |
| Document and email intelligence | NZ$1,000 to $8,000 | 2 to 5 weeks | Applications read, checked and filed, contracts summarised, an inbox sorted and answered in your voice. |
| AI assistants, agents and a company brain | NZ$3,000 to $12,000 | 3 to 6 weeks | A customer assistant on your site that books calls, or an internal one that answers from your own documents. |
| Custom apps and client portals | NZ$4,000 to $15,000 | 6 to 12 weeks | A quoting tool, a scheduler, a portal with logins, payments and reporting. |
| Websites built for people and AI search | NZ$1,000 to $6,000 | 2 to 4 weeks | A fast marketing site with booking, chat and structure Google and ChatGPT can read. |
Past about NZ$15,000 a job usually stops being one job. At that point I'd split it into stages, each with its own price, so you're never more than one stage into something before you see it working.
The number comes from looking at the actual process, not from a rate card. It goes like this:
Five things move a job up or down its range:
Everything needed to get the agreed process running live and handed over is inside the price.
Anything ongoing, anything you already pay for, and anything outside the written scope sits outside the fixed price. None of it is hidden: it's listed in the proposal.
For a typical small-business automation, the monthly cost after go-live is the support plan from NZ$99 plus a few dollars to a few tens of dollars of AI usage.
To give that a real shape: reading a typed one-page supplier invoice and returning its fields costs roughly a third of a US cent on a small AI model. A thousand invoices a month comes to about NZ$6 of usage, or about NZ$11 on a mid-range model, based on published model prices as of October 2026. I pass that on at cost. The rest is the support plan, which pays for the alert when something fails and a fix the same day during New Zealand business hours.
There's a full breakdown, including staff seats, in what AI costs to run each month.
The numbers below are from published case studies, with the clients anonymised as they are on the site.
A property developer with no admin staff. Two automations on a fixed price, running in the developer's own AWS account with their own templates. Subcontractor agreements went from about an hour each to two minutes, in the owner's words, which is 15 to 20 hours a month back at three to five agreements a week. The accounts inbox, up to 42 supplier messages a day, is now sorted and filed automatically, with zero misfiled across the October 2026 audits. Both ran in shadow mode against live mail before they were allowed to file anything. Read the property case study.
An NZ-wide air-conditioning company. A bigger job, built in stages from February 2026: scheduling and a CRM first, then quotes, purchase orders, compliance forms, SMS and billing, each live before the next started. It replaced a job-management subscription costing $1,200 a month, and month-end billing across four Xero organisations went from the better part of a day per entity to under an hour of checking. That's what the top of the range looks like when it's split into stages. Read the HVAC case study.
Small jobs, fixes and advice are billed hourly, at a rate agreed upfront, because a fixed price would cost you more to write than to do. Eg: a change to an existing automation, a second opinion on someone else's quote, or an hour working through which AI tool your team should use.
For a build, though, I'd be wary of anyone quoting open-ended hourly with no cap. All the risk sits with you, and nobody has to say upfront what done looks like. If a consultant can't give you a fixed number after a proper look at the process, it usually means they haven't looked closely enough yet.
As of October 2026, Ez-AI's fixed-price builds start at NZ$500 for automation across the tools you already run, NZ$1,000 for reading documents and email, NZ$3,000 for AI assistants and NZ$4,000 for custom apps, with most first projects landing between NZ$500 and $15,000 excluding GST. Hosting, monitoring and support start at NZ$99 a month, and AI usage is billed at cost.
Not usually. The price is worked out from the same estimate an hourly quote would use, but the risk of it taking longer sits with the builder rather than with you. Where a fixed price can cost more is when the scope is vague, because the builder has to allow for the unknowns. A clear written scope keeps it tight.
Nothing changes for you. The price is fixed against the agreed scope, so extra time is the builder's problem. The price only moves if you change the scope, and that change is written down with its cost and timing before any of it is built.
Yes. It's 30 minutes with no obligation, and the written proposal that follows is yours to keep whether or not you go ahead. If automation isn't the right answer for your problem, you're told so and there is no invoice.
Two, as of October 2026. Hosting, monitoring and support on a monthly plan from NZ$99, and AI model usage billed at cost, which is usually a few dollars to a few tens of dollars a month for a small business. Staff seats for tools like ChatGPT or Copilot are a separate bill if you choose to have them. There is no licence fee and no lock-in.
No. All prices exclude GST. EZ-AI.NZ LIMITED is GST registered and invoices in New Zealand dollars.
Bring the process that hurts the most to a free 30-minute call. If automation will help, you'll get a written proposal with a fixed price and a go-live date. If it won't, you'll hear that on the call. Discovery is always free.
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