Why publish prices at all?

Because “book a call to find out” is a tax on your time, and because the market's range — $297/month tools to six-figure consulting builds — makes unpriced offers impossible to compare. Publishing the ladder costs us the mystery and saves both sides a bad-fit call.

Is the $750 audit refundable?

It's credited, not refunded: the $750 comes off the Second Brain build in full if you go ahead. If you stop after the audit, you keep the audit deliverable — a map of what your business knows, where it lives, and what should never enter an AI system.

What's the contract term?

The Second Brain and the Exploration are fixed-scope, one-time projects. Monthly departments go month-to-month after month 6, by design — retention by competence, not contract. You keep the data, dashboards, and runbooks whenever you leave, and tokens revoke in one click.

Do prices include ad spend or tool subscriptions?

No. Your ad budgets and your existing tool subscriptions stay yours, in your accounts. The retainer covers building and operating the agents. Where AI usage runs on your own keys, that stays in your accounts too — you can see exactly what the system consumes.

What Helix AI Costs

Q: Why do prices say “from”?

Because the honest drivers vary: how many modules, how many systems the agents touch, how complex the approval flows are, and how much of your knowledge already exists in writing versus in heads. The Exploration exists precisely to turn “from” into a fixed number for your business before you commit to a build.

Two ways to start

The Second Brain path — from $4,250 one-time

A fixed-scope build that turns scattered company knowledge into one clean, AI-readable memory layer you own. It starts with a $750 knowledge audit, credited in full to the build — no integrations to approve, no platform permissions to wait on, and every agent built later plugs into it. An optional Care plan at $500/month keeps it current: a weekly curate cycle, a monthly re-test, a quarterly refresh. The demo brain shows exactly what you get.

The Exploration path — from $2,500, credited

A paid, scoped deep-dive for businesses ready to think department-scale: we map the highest-ROI work to automate and model its dollar value from your own numbers, ending in a module build plan. Credited in full to month one if you build. You keep the plan either way.

Monthly departments

Tier	Price	What runs
Core	From $4,000/mo	The three highest-ROI agents from your Exploration, built on your stack and run behind your approval.
Pro	From $8,000/mo	A working AI department across sales, ops, and retention — up to seven modules, agents earning autonomy as they prove out.
Complete	From $15,000/mo	The full roster — 15+ agents running the operation, with a custom agent built each month.

Every tier is built on the tools you already run, measured on your own numbers, and operated behind your approval. Capacity is real, not artificial: three build slots a month, because one operator builds and runs everything — that's the fractional AI department model.

What moves the price

The "from" is honest, and these are the drivers: how many modules you run; how many systems the agents touch (a CRM and an inbox is one thing; CRM, billing, community, ads, and a warehouse feed is another); approval complexity — how many action types, how many human checkpoints; and how much of your knowledge already exists in writing versus living in heads, which sets the size of the memory-layer work. The Exploration turns "from" into a fixed number for your business before you commit.

What's always included — and what isn't

Included: validation of every agent action against its real side-effect; human approval gates until an action type earns autonomy; measurement on your own metrics, not a vendor dashboard; your data, dashboards, and runbooks stay yours; one-click token revocation; month-to-month after month 6.
Not included: ad spend and your existing tool subscriptions — they stay in your accounts, where you can see them. Where AI usage runs on your own keys, that transparency is the point.

Where this sits in the market

The market runs from $297/month template tools — where you are the operator — to six-figure consulting builds with months of discovery. Helix sits in between, deliberately: operator-run systems with published prices, entry projects under $5K, and departments that cost less per year than one mid-level ops hire. If a $297 tool genuinely fixes your bottleneck, buy the tool — the scorecard will tell you honestly which situation you're in.

What Helix AI costs