Should I sell AI services as one-off projects or a membership?

Use the project to get in the door, then move the client onto a membership. The project is the hook. The membership is the business.

Why start with a project at all?

Because a project is what the client is asking for. You hear what they want short term and charge $1,000, $5,000, $20,000, whatever you think you can get. Those numbers were me thinking out loud while advising someone, not a price list I've sold from. The job gets you trusted. It shouldn't be the whole relationship.

A one-time build can also be the right product on its own. Instead of a SaaS at $50 or $100 a month, you build the thing for $3,000, $5,000 or $20,000 and hand it over. I think that could fit fields like healthcare, where HIPAA is a concern. You built something with their own stuff and gave it to them.

What's wrong with staying project-only?

• No compounding. Every project starts over.
• No floor. When the project ends, so does the revenue.
• You own the fixes. This is the big one.

"If all you're doing is teaching, coaching, supporting, and building some stuff for them, but it's on them, it's just part of your membership, it doesn't mean we're going to fix it. The problem is when you build for them, now you're responsible for the fixes."

If you built it, every break is your problem, on a fee you already collected. Done-for-you retainers carry a version of the same risk. With one or two clients it's easy to say yes to everything. The risk is they start asking for too much.

What does the full ladder look like?

I think in three levels, and the middle one is the one I want to sell most.

Level	What they get	Price I've sketched
Hourly consulting	Your time, one-on-one	$300-$400 an hour
Done with you (membership)	Setup, tools, creative, weekly group calls; they implement	$500-$1,000 a month
Done for you (retainer)	Your team does the work	$1,500-$4,000 a month

My Meta ads version shows how the middle tier works. We set up your Meta ads once, because getting every detail right is the hardest part. We give you creative ideas and a section where we upload our creatives. Then you run it, and once a week there's an hour of office hours where anybody with a Meta question jumps on. They get a lot of help. We get scale.

Agency is for people who don't even want to think about it. Community is for people who want to do it themselves.

Why sell the middle tier?

• More people say yes. People are more willing to pay $500 to $1,000 a month than $2,000 to $4,000.
• Nothing is done for one person. Everything happens at scale as a group. Thirty legacy local media brands at $800 a month is $24,000 a month, and each member gets thousands a month in value.
• You're not on the hook forever. You teach them and give them the tools, but you don't go into their system and do it for them.

Is a membership slower money than consulting?

Yes, at first. Consulting can pay $1,000 to $3,000 per client. A community starting small at $100 a month needs 10 to 30 people to match one consulting client. Consulting is the faster path to revenue. The membership is the one that scales.

Are AI agents reliable enough to sell done-for-you?

Not yet, in my experience as of mid-2026. My own Slack-to-music automation went from brain dump to finished MP3 in five minutes. Then a coding agent change meant to fix a Slack reply issue broke the whole flow, it couldn't correct itself, and diagnosing it took hours. A peer who deploys agents for clients told me his break daily, and the gap between the demo and production is wide.

That's why my membership model is to teach workflows and provide tools while carrying zero responsibility when something breaks.

What does the membership actually sell?

Access to you and your team: coaching, support, building help, templates. The customer keeps ownership of what they build. And clients mostly don't care who answers. Nobody's going to care whether it's an employee, me or you. That's what lets the membership grow past your own calendar.

• One engine, small modifications. Build one general system and change about 10% per industry, a car dealership version, say.
• Ship reusable builds to everyone. Anything one member gets that others could use goes to all of them.
• Use case studies. The first customer's results sell the next one.

What should the membership cost?

My sketch is two tiers, about $400 and about $1,000 a month, with the cheap one strictly group. Details in what an AI membership should include and cost. For done-for-you price ranges, see AI automation service pricing.