Custom AI Tools for Small Business

The bit nobody says out loud

What you are actually paying for

Nearly every AI product is a website sitting on top of the same handful of AI companies. Your money buys their app and their profit. The AI part costs a few cents.

	Paying monthly	Owning it
To start	Nothing, or a free trial	$40/hour, priced in writing first
Every month after	Their price, and it goes up as you grow	A few dollars of use
Who owns it	They do	You do, code and all
If you stop paying	It's gone, and your history with it	It keeps working. Nothing to cancel
Want it to work differently	Ask them, and wait	An hour of my time
Where your customer list sits	On their computers, under their rules	On yours, under yours
Where they beat me	It works this afternoon, and someone else is on call	You wait for me to build it

Here is what that looks like in money

Say you want something on your website that answers customer questions. Five hundred questions a month costs a few dollars to run. The version you rent starts around $50 a month, and charges you more as more people visit your site.

That is backwards. You are working hard to get more visitors, and it bills you for winning. I show you the actual bill and I add nothing to it. If you would rather the account was in your name and on your card, that is fine, and then I never see it at all.

Before you get excited

It never costs nothing

Every answer the tool gives costs a fraction of a cent. That is real money and it never stops. So if a page tells you to cancel everything and pay nothing ever again, that page is selling you something.

My claim is smaller and more boring. For most small business jobs, owning the tool costs somewhere between ten and a hundred times less each month than renting one. And at the end of it, you own the thing.

There are three costs. You see all three before you agree to anything.

Building it. $40/hour, hours written down and priced up front, same as every other job on this site.
Running it. A few dollars a month for most jobs. More if it works hard all day. You pay what I pay.
Somewhere for it to live. Usually nothing extra if it sits on the website I already host for you.

Sometimes paying monthly is the better deal, and I will say so. If you use the thing twice a month, you will never make the build cost back. If the tool you pay for does forty jobs and you only want one of them, keep it. And if someone answering the phone at 2am matters more to you than owning the code, that is worth paying for. I would rather tell you than take your money and watch you regret it.

What this actually is

Four things worth building, and what each one replaces

Small jobs with a right answer, using your own prices, hours and customer list. That is where this works. I would take on any of these tomorrow.

Sorting your inbox

Reads what comes in, tells you what it is in a line, and writes a reply for you to check and send. Real jobs kept apart from tyre-kickers, and both kept apart from the third supplier newsletter this week.

What it gives you back: your evenings. I built this one for my own email first, so it is the one I know best.

Google reviews

Writes a reply to each review that sounds like you, for you to check. Then asks the customer for a review a few days after the job, while they still remember it.

What it replaces: review tools, which run somewhere around $100 to $300 a month to do this one thing.

Answering questions on your site

Answers customer questions using your own pages, prices and opening hours. Told to say "I don't know, here is the number to call" instead of guessing, because a confident wrong answer about your prices is worse than no answer.

What it replaces: chat widgets, which usually charge by how many people use them, so the bill grows just as your website starts working.

Writing up quotes and paperwork

Turns a photo, a voice note or a few scribbled lines into a draft quote or job sheet. Reads the numbers off invoices so you are not typing them in again.

What it replaces: retyping, mostly. And the quote that never went out because it was Friday.

Paying for something else? Tell me what it is

The other half of the honest answer

Where I would tell you not to

I wrote a whole post about where AI quietly costs you money, with the research in it. Nothing on this page argues with it.

It will be wrong, and it will sound certain

Not now and then, and not in a way it warns you about. So everything I build gets your real prices and hours to work from, and gets told to admit it does not know rather than make something up. It is also why the answer to "can it just send the quote itself" is no. It writes. You check. You send. That last step is the whole safety net and I am not taking it out.

Anything where being wrong is expensive

Prices going out unchecked. Promising a customer you are free on Tuesday. Anything legal or medical. If one wrong answer costs you more than a minute of reading, spend the minute.

It does not replace a person

It takes away the typing, not the deciding. If you are hoping to stop answering the phone, this is the wrong thing to buy, and I would rather lose the job than let you find that out three months in.

Read the long version, with the studies →

Two businesses at a time

The first one is free.

Same deal as the free homepage. I build one small tool for your business, set it up where you can actually use it, and charge you nothing. No card, nothing to cancel. If it earns its keep we carry on at $40/hour. If it does not, you have lost one email. Two at a time rather than five, because these take longer than a homepage.

Start with my bill See the free homepage offer

What's behind the claim

What I have actually built with this

This is the part most pages like this one skip.

SwansonX Music Studio

Live, on its own web address. Type a few words, get back a finished song with its own cover art. I built all of it and it runs today.

My own product, not a client's. See how it works.

Build Studio and Asset Studio

Two desktop programs with AI built into them. One edits a website while you watch. The other draws textures for 3D models.

Both still being built, and labelled that way on the work page like everything else.

SEO Agents

Checks every website I run overnight and puts the results on one screen. No AI in it at all, but it is the same idea on a smaller scale.

It replaced a service I used to pay for monthly and now costs me almost nothing.

No client has paid me to build them an AI tool yet. Everything above is my own software. I am not going to pass my own products off as client work, and you should be wary of anyone who does, because this is all about eighteen months old and almost nobody has done as much of it as they suggest. That gap is exactly why the first two are free. I need the example more than you need to take a risk on me.

Where to start

Send me what you pay every month

List the software you pay for. I will come back and tell you what I could replace, what I could not, and what it would cost to build. It is free, and sometimes the answer is that you should keep paying them.

Business name

What do you do? One line. The trade, and roughly how many of you there are.

Your website (if you have one)

Email address

What software do you pay for every month? Rough numbers are fine. I only need a rough idea, not your books.

No card, no call to book, no mailing list. I reply within 24 hours.

What you get back

Which of it I could replace
Which of it I could not, and why
The hours, and a fixed price to build it
An honest guess at the monthly running cost

Rather call or text?

Easier if your bills are spread across four different cards.

Call (218) 818-1023

Text (218) 818-1023

Straight answer guarantee

The same one that applies everywhere else on this site. If what you already pay for is good, and I would only be building a worse copy of it, I will tell you that instead of selling you something.

Questions

The things people ask before starting

How much cheaper is this really?

For most small business jobs, running your own tool costs a few dollars a month. Renting one costs somewhere between $30 and a few hundred. So it is ten to a hundred times cheaper to run. What it is not is free: there is the build cost first, priced in writing at $40/hour, and it takes a few months of saved fees before you are ahead. If you pay $20 a month for something you like, you will probably never get that time back, and I will tell you so.

Which AI does it use?

Whichever one suits the job, and I tell you which before I build anything. Most small business work runs perfectly well on a cheaper, faster one, and putting the most expensive AI behind a job that does not need it is how a few dollars a month turns into a few hundred. I also build it so the AI can be swapped later, because this all changes quickly and I am not going to tie you to one company.

Will it make things up about my business?

It will try. Every one of these tools does, including the ones you pay monthly for. What I do about it is give it your real prices, your real hours and your real pages to work from, rather than letting it remember them, and tell it to say "I don't know, here is the number to call" when it is asked something it was not given. Then I test the customer-facing ones with the questions people actually ask, including the awkward ones.

Is my information used to train anything?

Not by me, and not by the AI companies I use on the terms I use them under. I will send you their written policy rather than ask you to take my word for it. And if you would rather the account was in your own name on your own card, that works too, and then your information never touches anything of mine.

What if the price of the AI goes up?

You would feel it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Prices have come down for the last two years, which is not a promise about the next two. It is one reason I build these so the AI can be changed: if one company puts prices up, or a cheaper one gets good enough, that is a small job rather than starting again.

Do I need the care plan for this?

No, but it is where most of these end up. If I already host your website, a tool added to it usually costs nothing extra to run, and small changes come out of the hours you already have. If you would rather own it outright and host it yourself, say so and I will price the build on its own and hand you the code. What the care plan covers.

Start with the bill, not the technology.

Tell me what you pay for every month, and what you wish it did instead. That is a better first conversation than anything either of us could say about AI.

Send me my monthly bill Email me directly