The AI Project Pricing & Scoping Playbook Nobody Wrote (But Every Dev Consultant Needs)

You land a client. They want "an AI assistant that handles customer support." You quote $8,000. Three months later you're still adding features, the budget is gone, and you've built four completely different versions of a system that still doesn't match what they actually wanted. This happens constantly in AI consulting. Not because the devs are bad — because AI projects have a unique failure mode that standard freelance scoping doesn't account for. Here's the framework I use now. Why AI Project