The short answer: a credible AI readiness assessment for a mid-market company runs $15,000 to $75,000 in 2026, depending on who's selling it and how it's scoped. ProIncident's tiers sit at the accessible end of that range — $8,500 for a two-week Opportunity Scan (25–100 employees), $18,500 for the full Readiness & Risk Assessment (100–350), and from $32,500 for enterprise and regulated organizations — and every number is published on our pricing page. The rest of this article explains where those numbers come from, so you can evaluate any proposal that lands on your desk, including ours.
What you're actually buying
An assessment worth paying for produces four things: a scored baseline across the dimensions that determine whether AI will work in your organization (strategy, data, technology, people, governance, security); a risk register covering shadow AI, data exposure, vendor terms, and compliance gaps, each rated and paired with a control; a ranked use-case portfolio with ROI modeled on your numbers, not a vendor's slide; and a costed roadmap your CFO can budget against. If a proposal doesn't name these deliverables, you're buying a workshop, not an assessment.
The three things that drive price
Organization size. More departments means more interviews, more systems, more evidence to collect and reconcile. A 60-person company can be scored in two weeks; a 700-person company with four business units cannot.
Compliance load. HIPAA, CMMC, SOC 2, insurance frameworks, and customer flow-down requirements each add a mapping layer — the assessment has to trace findings to obligations, and that's real analytical work.
System complexity. The number of platforms, integrations, and data stores in play determines how long the technology and data dimensions take to score honestly.
Notice what's not on the list: your budget, your urgency, or how hard you negotiate. When those things move a price, you're not looking at a scoped fee — you're looking at value-based pricing wearing a scope costume.
Why the market range is so wide
The $15K–$75K spread isn't about quality; it's mostly about delivery model. Firms that fly consultants to your office bake travel, hotels, and coordination overhead into the fee. Global brands add a premium for the logo on the report. And open-ended "discovery phases" inflate scope before the real work starts. Remote-first delivery strips out the first cost, and fixed-fee scoping eliminates the third — which is how a rigorous assessment lands under $20K without cutting analytical corners.
What free assessments cost
Vendor-run "AI readiness assessments" at no charge are lead qualification for a software sale, and the findings reliably point at the vendor's product. That's not cynicism; it's just their business model. A free assessment can be a fine way to hear a pitch — it is not a baseline you can govern from.
The fixed-fee argument
Hourly billing rewards slowness and punishes efficiency — the longer the engagement runs, the more the firm makes. A fixed fee tied to defined deliverables puts the estimation risk on the firm, where it belongs, and lets you compare proposals on scope instead of on rate-card arithmetic. It's why we publish every number we charge: transparency reads as exactly what it is — confidence in the scope.
If you want the specifics of how our assessment runs week by week, the AI Readiness & Risk Assessment page walks the full remote process. If you want to talk through which tier fits, book a 30-minute briefing — no pitch deck, and if we're not the right fit, we'll say so. Prefer to gauge yourselves first? The six-dimension self-check is the free version of the same lens.