AI Made Me Faster Than Ever. Pricing My Work Has Never Been Harder.
In 2017, a close friend and I built a social mobile app from scratch. It took three years to ship. A real team, real infrastructure, real effort. We couldn’t crack monetization and eventually had to shut it down.
A few weeks ago, I picked that codebase back up. Hadn’t touched it in seven years. I rebuilt the entire backend on a modern framework, overhauled the infrastructure, and shipped a significant mobile upgrade.
I had a working version in a weekend. Nearly production-ready in about two weeks.
What would have taken a solid team six months to a year, I did largely on my own, in a fraction of the time, with better architecture than the original. I’m not writing this to brag. I’m writing this because it genuinely made me think about the cost of building and in the service providing business, how do you accurately estimate your work.
The Formula Everyone Is Still Using
For decades, software development and consulting ran on one equation:
Time × Rate = Price
It made sense. More complexity meant more hours. More hours meant more cost. You estimated conservatively, padded for unknowns, and presented a number. Clients compared vendors by that number. Vendors competed on it.
AI just quietly dismantled one side of that equation, and most procurement cycles, vendor contracts, and client expectations haven’t moved an inch.
A senior engineer working with the right AI tooling today isn’t 10 or 20 percent faster. On the right problems, they are three, four, sometimes five times faster, with better documentation, fewer bugs, and more consistent output than before. And here’s the part that still surprises me every time: it doesn’t feel that complex anymore. Not because the problems are simpler, but because the tools have fundamentally changed what execution feels like.
That’s the exciting part. You can deliver more, at higher quality, in less time than ever before in the history of this industry.
I’m currently about a month into a complex enterprise engagement. The kind of project that historically carried serious weight in time and budget. We’re nearly done.
But that excitement comes with a question I haven’t been able to shake. If building feels less complex and time is shrinking, what exactly are you charging for?
This isn’t just something small operators like me are wrestling with. McKinsey recently disclosed that a quarter of its global fees now come from outcomes-based pricing. Clients aren’t arriving with a scope anymore. They’re arriving with the outcome they want and asking McKinsey to price against actually delivering it. If that’s happening at the top of the consulting pyramid, the rest of the industry needs to pay attention.
What Clients Are Actually Buying
Here’s something that surprised me when I started my own business. Something I didn’t fully expect.
Not every client is buying outcomes. Some are buying presence. Visible effort. A human being engaged over time. Hours on an invoice as a proxy for care and seriousness.
When I first encountered this as an operator it caught me off guard. I came in with an outcomes-first mentality, focused entirely on results and value delivered. And then I realized that for some clients, the human behind the work matters as much as the work itself. The relationship, the availability, the feeling that someone is genuinely invested alongside them.
I understand it now. And I accept it. It comes from decades of clients being trained to equate time and presence with value. It’s not irrational. It’s human.
But it adds another layer to an already complicated billing question. Because if part of what you’re selling is yourself, your judgment, your experience, your presence, how does that change when AI compresses the execution side of the equation? I don’t have a clean answer. What I do know is that it makes the relationship side of this business more important, not less.
One Idea That Stuck With Me
I picked up The Consulting Bible by Alan Weiss not long ago. One idea stopped me cold:
Your price is not determined by your hours. It is determined by your value to the client and what they are willing to pay for your expertise.
I’m still working out what that looks like in practice in the AI era. But it points at something real. The consultant who knows what to build and why, and can now build it in a third of the time, isn’t worth less. The expertise didn’t shrink. The hours did.
And yet. If building no longer feels as complex as it once did, does that change the value equation? I think about this a lot. My honest answer is no, because the complexity was never really in the execution. It was always in knowing what to build, why to build it, and how to make sure it actually solves the right problem. AI handles more of the former. It doesn’t touch the latter.
But that argument only works if the client trusts you enough to believe it. Which brings everything back to the same place it always has. Relationships first. Trust before pricing. That part hasn’t changed and I don’t think it ever will.
Where I’m Landing, For Now
Here’s what I know. AI lets you deliver more in less time. That part is exciting. What I’m still figuring out is the billing side. If complexity is no longer the anchor, and time is no longer the measure, what is? Is there even a right formula anymore?
That’s the question I’m sitting with as an operator. And I’m not coming at it from a place of having figured it out. I’m coming at it from a place of building every day, watching what AI actually does in practice, and trying to stay honest about what that means for how I run my business and serve my clients.
I suspect a lot of you are in the same place.
If you’re a consultant, a technology leader, or a business owner navigating this, I’d genuinely love to hear how you’re thinking about it. Not looking for a definitive answer. Just an honest conversation with people who are figuring it out in real time, same as me.