Most consulting websites won't tell you what they charge. We will, with caveats. AI and digital transformation consulting in Atlantic Canada has a wide price range, and where you land in that range depends on four things: scope, how thick the deliverables are, how many people from your organization need to be involved, and how serious the change-management piece is. Here's the honest math.
The four cost drivers
1. Scope
A focused workshop or assessment is a different cost from an end-to-end transformation. Our pricing reflects that, and so does anyone else's pricing if they're being straight with you.
- Workshop or single-stage assessment: usually $5,000 to $15,000. Days to a few weeks.
- Full diagnostic or strategy engagement: usually $15,000 to $50,000. Two to ten weeks.
- Multi-stage program: usually $50,000 to $250,000. Several months, scoped one stage at a time.
2. Deliverable depth
A 10-page diagnostic and a 40-page strategy report take meaningfully different amounts of work to produce well. Cited stats, charts, scenario modelling, and proper sourcing add cost. They also add value, which is why we lean toward written reports over slide decks.
McKinsey research suggests that companies executing transformations with rigour (over 80 percent of target captured in 24 months) achieve exponentially higher success rates (McKinsey, 2024). The deliverable is what carries that rigour forward when we're gone.
3. Stakeholder count
Two interviews and a CEO readout is a different scope from twelve interviews, three workshops, and a board presentation. More stakeholders means more time, more synthesis, and more rework as alignment drifts. We charge for the time, not for the meetings. But meetings are time.
4. Change management
Adoption is where most transformations die. Initiatives with excellent change management are seven times more likely to meet objectives than those with poor change management (Prosci, 2023). If your engagement includes rollout, training, and feedback loops (it should), expect 30 to 50 percent of total project cost to live there. People line items, not technology line items.
Realistic ranges for Atlantic Canadian SMBs
For an organization between 10 and 500 people, our pricing for digital transformation work generally lands in these ranges:
- A pulse check or workshop: free or under $5,000.
- A Diagnostic Mirror (Stage 1): $12,000 to $20,000.
- A full Strategy & Vision (Stage 3): $25,000 to $50,000.
- An end-to-end Diagnose to Decide engagement: $40,000 to $90,000.
- A Decide to Deliver engagement, with implementation orchestration: $80,000 to $250,000+.
What's not in those numbers: the technology itself, vendor licenses, your team's time, and any custom build work that we orchestrate but don't perform directly.
Where the money saves you
Three places. None of them are 'we cost less than McKinsey,' which is true but not the actual point.
First: grants. A typical Atlantic Canadian SMB can stack ACOA REGI, provincial programs, and SR&ED to cover 50 to 75 percent of project cost. That changes the consulting math more than any negotiation. We wrote a separate post on the funding programs that matter in 2026, including how to stack them properly.
Second: avoided mistakes. McKinsey says 70 percent of transformations fail to achieve their objectives (McKinsey, 2024). Bain puts the figure at 88 percent (Bain, 2024). The cost of a failed transformation is rarely the consulting fee. It's the year you lost, the team that disengaged, and the budget you can't ask for again.
Third: the productivity gain. BDC research suggests SME productivity could rise up to 38 percent at high digital maturity (BDC, 2024). On a $5 million revenue organization, that's $1.9 million of annual upside if the transformation is real. Consulting fees are a small fraction of that even at the high end.
Hidden costs nobody talks about
Internal time. A diagnostic that involves six interviews plus two workshops plus a readout is roughly 25 hours of your team's time across six weeks. That's a real cost we factor in even though we don't bill for it.
Data preparation. If your organization's data lives in spreadsheets and people's heads, every analysis stage takes longer because we have to clean it first. Sometimes the diagnostic uncovers that data prep is the actual first project. We name it when we see it.
Vendor lock-in. Some technology decisions look cheap up front and become expensive in year three. Architecture & Vendor Selection (Stage 6 of our methodology) explicitly prices the full multi-year cost, beyond the year-one quote. We don't take vendor commissions, so the recommendation is yours.
Change management for departing staff. If your transformation includes process automation, a portion of work people are doing today won't be needed. Doing that humanely (early communication, retraining where possible, severance where not) is a cost. Pretending it isn't is how organizations get a bad reputation in small markets.
How we price
Fixed price per stage, agreed up front. We give you a written scope and a written deliverable definition before we start. If we underestimate, that's our problem, not yours. If you change scope mid-engagement, we re-scope in writing.
No hourly billing for project work. We've found hourly creates the wrong incentive. Our incentive is to ship a useful deliverable, not to extend hours.
No vendor commissions, ever. The recommendation in your Architecture & Vendor Selection report is picked for fit, not for our economics.
Retainer engagements for ongoing advisory are different. Those are monthly fee plus quarterly review, used for the post-transformation period when you want a sounding board without a full engagement.
If you want a real estimate for your situation, the only honest way is a free 30-minute call where we ask the questions that actually drive cost: scope, deliverable depth, stakeholder count, change management. We'll give you a range with reasoning before you commit to anything.