Issue #1 — Pricing AI Services

Late September, Frédéric Auguste published a post with an ugly title: "Why I Put a $25,000 Audit on Sale for $299."

He'd run a $25,000-style audit — the kind of deep technical review that used to mean weeks of consultant time — with AI agents working overnight. And he'd already measured his compute: a heavy agentic day costs him $30–60 of list-price compute.

So he priced it at $299.

That's the deflationary pressure nobody in services wants to say out loud. AI doesn't make your work a little cheaper. It can make it eighty times cheaper. If you can do it, the person pitching your customer next month can too.

The question for anyone selling services right now: how do you price when the cost floor keeps dropping?

Aaron Edwards sells DocsBot AI — chatbots and support agents trained on a company's own documents. On Chris Koerner's podcast (Ep. #341, October 6), Edwards laid out his actual model for reselling AI agent services to local businesses: $2,000 setup, $500 a month.

Edwards says DocsBot hit $1M in annual recurring revenue in February 2026. So the $2K/$500 number isn't a guess — it's the price tag on a working business. A local shop pays two grand to get set up and five hundred a month to keep the agent answering. That's a utility price, not a project price. Utilities get paid forever. Projects get shopped every year.

Koerner runs playmakersai.com, where he trains AI consultants. The consultants he trains charge $500 to $5,000 a month for AI implementation work, depending on scope.

That's the next rung up from Edwards's model. You don't just sell the tool. You sell the setup, the tuning, the ongoing judgment. And the spread — $500 to $5K — tells you the market hasn't settled on one number yet. There's room to move up by tying your price to bigger outcomes.

Marc Aristide sells one thing: a loyalty program for nutrition shops. One feature. $97 a month. He reports making $20,000 a month on it — and says about a third of that revenue comes from rebilling: marking up the texts, emails, and AI usage running underneath.

Read that margin structure twice. The product is the wrapper. The margin is the usage you resell. $97 a month from a pile of small shops, tiny team, and the markup doing the heavy lifting.

Alex Hormozi's offer equation, from his book $100M Offers, explains all three:

“Value = (Dream Outcome × Perceived Likelihood) / (Time Delay × Effort & Sacrifice)”

Auguste's $299 audit works because the dream outcome (a $25K-style audit) is huge and the effort required is zero. Edwards's $500/mo works because the outcome (never miss a customer question again) is concrete and arrives fast. Aristide's $97/mo works because the effort is nil — a loyalty program that runs itself.

Hormozi's point, applied here: customers don't pay for your cost. They pay for the outcome divided by the hassle. When AI collapses your cost, you don't collapse your price. You rebuild the offer around the outcome.

Stop pricing on hours. If AI can do the work overnight, hours are a race to zero. Price on the outcome instead: what's the answered question worth, what's the recovered lead worth, what's a month of never missing a call worth?

The three anchors give you a ladder. A $97/mo micro-tool for one painful problem. A $500/mo agent service with a setup fee. A $500–$5K/mo implementation tier for bigger outcomes. Pick the rung that matches the size of the outcome you deliver.

At CED, this isn't theory — it's our own packaging worksheet. We run a diagnostic first, then a flat-fee fix, then a monthly tier, because the only price that survives AI deflation is one tied to an outcome the customer can feel.

Sources: Frédéric Auguste ("Why I Put a $25,000 Audit on Sale for $299," Medium, late Sept 2026; "$30–60 of compute per heavy agentic day"); Aaron Edwards on The Koerner Office Ep. #341 (Oct 6, 2026) — $2K setup / $500/mo resale, says DocsBot hit $1M ARR Feb 2026; Chris Koerner (playmakersai.com — trains consultants charging $500–$5K/mo); Marc Aristide (via Keaton Walker's Sept 2, 2026 video — $20K/mo on $97/mo loyalty SaaS, ~1/3 from rebilling); Alex Hormozi ($100M Offers — the value equation).

From our side of the loop: Reading about AI pricing is one thing; knowing what YOUR business should buy, skip, or build is another. Our AI-Readiness Audit scores your current setup and gives you the exact next moves — $97, one time: https://buy.stripe.com/aFa28s6ZKghN7YlgsD6EU00

From our side of the loop: Human-N-Loop gear — original AI-art shirts and gifts from our own shop: https://human-n-loop.com