How much does AI automation cost for a small business in Canada?

Here's the short answer, since most pages make you scroll past 800 words of throat-clearing to find it: most small business automation projects in Canada land between $2,500 and $15,000. Simple integration work sits at the low end. Custom tools and websites sit in the middle. Full products, the kind with app stores and investors involved, start around $15,000 and go up from there.

Now the longer answer, which is where the money actually gets saved or wasted.

Why nobody tells you this. Ask most agencies what automation costs and you'll get a discovery call, a proposal, and a number that arrived fully formed from somewhere behind the curtain. The vagueness isn't an accident. Unpublished pricing lets the quote fit the client instead of the work.

We publish our ranges because you're a business owner. You price things for a living. You can handle a number.

What the ranges actually cover.

Connecting what you already own ($2,500 and up). The unglamorous tier, and honestly the one most businesses need first. Your booking system, your accounting software, and your inbox all work fine; they've just never been introduced to each other. Wiring them together is days of work, and it's usually where the fastest payback lives. If someone quotes you five figures to make two tools talk, get a second opinion.

A custom build ($5,000 to $15,000). A quoting tool that knows your real costs. An intake flow that fills itself. A website that turns searches into booked calls. This tier exists because your business runs on a process nobody else has, and off-the-shelf software keeps guessing wrong.

A full product ($15,000 and up). Native apps, multi-tenant platforms, prototypes built to survive an investor meeting. If you're here, you already know, and the real question is scoping, which deserves its own conversation.

What actually moves the price. Three things, in order: how messy the current setup is, how many systems have to cooperate, and how custom the logic gets. The thing that doesn't move the price much is the AI itself. The models are the cheap part now. You're paying for someone to understand your business well enough to point them at the right problem.

What you shouldn't pay for. A build you didn't need. A decent chunk of the businesses we assess don't need anything built at all; they need two subscriptions connected and a third one cancelled. If a consultant's diagnostic always concludes that you need their biggest service, that's a sales letter with extra steps.

Where to start. Not with a build. Start by finding out where your hours are actually going, because until you know that, every price on this page is a guess about someone else's business. That's the whole reason our assessment exists: $899, everything in writing, and it counts toward the build if there is one. If there isn't, it says so, and you'll have spent less than one month of the software you're about to cancel.