Ask what an AI quoting tool costs and you will usually get one of two answers: "it depends," or a sales call. Both are dodges. Here are real numbers.
One thing first, so the rest of this makes sense. When people say "AI quoting tool," they mean software that takes job information, a phone call, some photos, a note from a walkthrough, and drafts a quote using your prices and your rules. You review it, fix what is wrong, and send it. The tool does the assembling. You keep the judgment.
There are three ways to get one, and they cost very different amounts.
Off the shelf: $30 to $150 a month
Most estimating and field-service software has been bolting on AI features for a couple of years now, and some of it is genuinely useful. If your quoting follows the standard patterns for your trade, this is usually the right answer: proven, supported, and somebody else fixes it when it breaks.
The limits are the trade-off. You work inside their templates, their workflow, and their idea of how a price book looks. If your quoting is unusual, you will spend your evenings fighting the tool instead of using it.
Do it yourself: about $20 a month
A general AI assistant, a well-written instruction sheet, and your price list gets you further than most people expect. You paste in the job details, it drafts the quote, you fix it up and send it. Clunky, manual, nothing gets saved anywhere, and the quality depends on how good your instructions are. But for a shop doing a few quotes a week, it is a real option, and it is the cheapest way to find out whether AI drafting actually helps you before spending more.
Custom built: $2,000 to $15,000 up front
The wide range is scope. Reading messy inputs like photos and voicemails, looking prices up across supplier sheets, pushing the finished quote into your invoicing system: each of those adds real work. A solo builder quotes the low end for a narrow scope. Agencies quote the high end, and sometimes well past it.
Two rules of thumb. Below about two thousand dollars, nobody serious is building anything custom. And above fifteen for a quoting tool at small-shop scale, somebody is padding.
Custom also has running costs, and here is where honesty matters. The AI usage itself is cheap. Quoting is text work, and text work costs pennies per quote, a few dollars a month at small-shop volume. Anyone charging you hundreds a month for "AI costs" on a quoting tool is marking something up. The real recurring cost is upkeep: your prices change, the AI companies retire old models, something breaks on a Tuesday. That is either a care arrangement in the $25 to $100 a month range, or it is your own evenings.
The cost nobody mentions
Every one of these options, including the cheapest, has the same hidden line item: your pricing has to come out of your head. Materials, labor rates, markups, the adjustments you make for a bad crawlspace or a good customer. Until that lives somewhere a tool can read, no tool can quote with it.
Getting it written down is most of the setup work, whatever you buy. It is also worth doing even if you buy nothing, which brings us to the spreadsheet.
When a spreadsheet wins
If you do fewer than about five quotes a week, and most of them are versions of the same handful of jobs, a quoting template with your real prices in it wins. It costs one afternoon, runs on software you already own, never gets discontinued, and captures most of the benefit an AI tool would give you. This is the answer a lot of shops should hear, and it is the one an AI vendor will never lead with.
The math that decides it
Same math as the three questions: hours saved, times what your time is worth.
A shop spending ten hours a week on quotes, at $85 an hour of owner time, is burning around $44,000 a year. Against that, a $6,000 build plus modest upkeep pays for itself inside a season. That shop should look hard at custom, or at the top end of off-the-shelf.
A shop doing one or two quotes a week has a problem worth a template or a $40-a-month tool. Anyone quoting that shop five figures for custom AI is selling, not advising.
These are ballparks, not quotes. Every shop's quoting is its own animal, which is the reason ranges are the honest way to talk about this and a single confident number from a stranger is a warning sign.
If you want the number for your shop specifically, that is what the free call is for. Fifteen minutes, your actual quoting process, a straight answer on which of these four paths fits. If the answer is a spreadsheet, I will say spreadsheet.