Every founder-led firm I talk to asks the same two questions in the first ten minutes:
- What does this cost?
- How long until I see something work?
And almost nobody on the internet answers them straight. You get “it depends,” a gated PDF, or a sales call disguised as a discovery call. So here’s the honest version, based on the engagements we actually run at Prospus.
The short answer
A real AI transformation for a founder-led firm with 10 to 100 people typically runs $25,000 to $150,000 in the first year, and you should see meaningful operational change within 6 to 10 weeks. If anyone quotes you under $10,000, they’re selling you a tool subscription and calling it transformation. If anyone quotes you over $250,000 before you’ve delivered anything, they’re selling you a readiness report.
We sit in the middle on purpose. Below is how that breaks down and what each tier actually gets you.
Tier 1: Foundation only ($25,000 to $45,000, 6 to 8 weeks)
This is for firms that already know what’s broken and just need someone to consolidate the work into one place where AI can actually help.
What’s included: workstack consolidation (chat, tasks, time, activity into a single environment), platform setup on Kaamfu, migration of existing project data from Asana / Monday / Notion / shared drives, team onboarding, and 60 days of adoption support.
What you should expect to see: every conversation, file, decision, and task in one place by week 4. AI assistance running against your actual work data by week 6. Managers getting hours back per week by week 8.
What it doesn’t include: rebuilding processes, growth content systems, or custom development.
Tier 2: Operational transformation ($55,000 to $95,000, 10 to 14 weeks)
This is what most of our clients buy. Tier 1 plus the work to actually fix how the organization runs.
Added scope: process inventory and redesign, role and responsibility mapping, AI-assisted workflows for the 5 to 8 most repetitive things your team does, leadership dashboards, and quarterly review cadence.
Most clients here cut coordination overhead by 30 to 50 percent inside the first quarter. The reason is simple: when work lives in one place and the AI can see all of it, you stop needing three people in a meeting to figure out where something stands.
Tier 3: Full transformation including growth ($110,000 to $150,000, 16 to 24 weeks)
Tier 2 plus the growth engine: content systematization, distribution workflows, and the marketing infrastructure that turns expertise into reach without hiring an agency.
This is for founders who want both sides — internal operations fixed and external growth running on the same system. It’s a bigger commitment, and it only makes sense if you’ve already validated demand and the bottleneck is execution, not market.
What about ongoing costs?
Kaamfu platform fees run separately, typically $40 to $90 per user per month depending on plan. Most clients spend $500 to $4,000 per month on platform, which replaces a stack that was usually costing them $1,500 to $8,000 across Asana, Slack, Notion, time tracking, file storage, and whatever AI subscriptions had piled up.
We don’t mark up the platform. It’s the same price you’d pay going direct.
How we compare to the alternatives
Hiring a Big 4 consulting firm: They’ll quote you $300,000 to $1.5M for a “readiness assessment” and a roadmap. You’ll get a 200-page deck. You will not get working systems. We’re a fraction of the price and the deliverable is an organization that runs differently.
Hiring an internal AI lead: Fully loaded, that’s $180,000 to $260,000 per year before they’ve shipped anything. They also need a platform to deploy on, which you don’t have yet. Most internal AI leads spend their first 9 months doing what we deliver in 10 weeks, because they’re learning your business while building.
Buying tools and figuring it out yourself: This is the most expensive option, and it’s the one most founders default to. The cost isn’t the tools. The cost is 18 months of your team adopting nothing, the founder doing implementation on weekends, and the eventual realization that you bought five overlapping tools and use one of them.
Other AI transformation consultants: Honestly, most of them are good at strategy and bad at execution, or vice versa. The thing that separates us is that we built and run the platform the transformation lands on. When we say something will work in 6 weeks, we’re not hoping a tool we don’t control will cooperate. The tool is ours.
When you should hire us
- You’re founder-led, 10 to 100 people, and your operations have outgrown the way you used to run them.
- You’ve tried at least one AI tool and gotten nowhere because it didn’t have your context.
- You want results in the next quarter, not a strategy deck for next year.
- You’re willing to consolidate. If you need to keep 14 separate tools because each department picked its own, this isn’t going to work.
When you shouldn’t hire us
- You’re under 10 people. Honestly, you don’t need us yet. Use the Kaamfu free tier and call when you’ve grown into it.
- You want someone to write a strategy deck without doing the implementation work. We don’t do that.
- You’re looking for the cheapest possible option. We’re not it.
- Your leadership isn’t actually committed to changing how the organization runs. No amount of platform fixes a leadership problem.
What happens in week 1
If you decide to move forward, here’s what the first week actually looks like. Not the brochure version.
Day 1 to 2: We set up your Kaamfu environment and get your leadership team in. No training session yet, just access.
Day 3 to 5: We do a working session with you and 2 to 3 key operators. We watch how work actually moves through your business right now. We don’t ask you to describe it. We watch it.
Day 6 to 7: We migrate the first batch of active projects in. By the end of week 1, your team is doing real work in the new environment, not a sandbox.
Most consultants spend week 1 in discovery meetings. We spend it building.
