Cut production time 40 percent with AI. Now a client wants the savings.

Five years running content for agents and a couple of small investment shops. Standard package is 16 posts, 4 short videos, and two listing writeups a month at $1,450.

Since spring I've rebuilt production around AI drafting. First pass copy, thumbnail variants, transcript to caption. Real numbers on my side: a package used to take me about 19 hours a month, now it's 11 to 12. Quality is fine, arguably better on the copy because I iterate more when iterating is cheap. Shooting and editing didn't change much, that's still hands on.

One client figured it out. He didn't accuse me of anything, he just said his nephew makes captions with the same tool and asked what he's paying for. That's a reasonable thing to ask and I don't have a clean answer ready.

My three options as I see them. Hold price and defend on strategy and consistency, which is true but hard to invoice. Drop him to $1,050 and keep the relationship, which resets the ceiling for everyone else once word moves. Or restructure entirely, charge for the strategy and calendar as a monthly fee and price the production per asset, so the AI savings show up as lower unit prices while my margin holds.

Option three is where I'm leaning but it makes my revenue lumpy and I've got one part time editor at $1,900 a month I need to cover consistently.

The thing I can't figure out is whether the nephew problem is real. He'll try it, he'll hate the sixth week of it, and he'll come back. Or he won't, and I've held price into an empty room.

1 reply

1mikeoconnell7SP2APRO6

The nephew problem is real for the captions and fake for everything else. What breaks self service is week six, exactly like you said. Quality isn't the issue. Nobody quits because the output was bad, they quit because Thursday arrived and nothing got made.

If I were pricing this I'd make that the product line. Sell the fact that it ships, on a schedule, whether or not he feels like it. Price the calendar and the publishing at a flat monthly number he can't reproduce with a tool, then let production be per asset so he can flex it down when he's slow.

On the $1,050, word getting out matters a lot less than what you learn. If he takes it and stays a year, you found the floor. My hesitation is that he already knows your cost went down. Any discount you give confirms his read, and next spring he'll ask again.

Cut production time 40 percent with AI. Now a client wants the savings.

1 reply