Should I charge less because I use AI?
One of our coaching members brought this up on Friday’s call. They’d seen another member put prices on their new website and wished they had the confidence to do the same. But they keep punishing themselves with the idea that everybody can do this with AI now, even if most people don’t, and that they should get paid less for doing it with AI instead of the old way.
It’s a good question, and I think we’re all still figuring it out. AI and AI agents have made producing assets cheap for everyone, whether you have no clue what you’re doing or you’re insanely talented and experienced.
I made a version of Angry Birds with my son
I had a bit of an existential crisis about this. That’s dramatic, but let’s call it that.
Do you remember Angry Birds? When it came out on the first iPhone, I played it constantly on the bus in Vancouver. It was simple and fun, and it turned into a huge empire.
I wanted to make an iPhone game back then, but I didn’t know C++ or Swift. I could design a game in my mind, but building one felt far-fetched.
A few days before the call, I was doing homework with my son at the table. When he finished, he drew a funny picture, I added to it, and we drew a couple more. I took photos and vectorized them.
Just for fun, I fired up a Claude Code session. My prompt was basically: take these drawings and make a really simple, hand-sketched game with Angry Birds mechanics. A couple of levels where you slingshot a big medicine ball at the funky-looking bros we drew, with built-in sound effects and one boss called the Big Bro, who has a life bar. I had it do a couple of design passes but kept it simple. I just wanted to surprise my son with his drawings.
About an hour later, I was lying down beside him at bedtime and said, “Hey, check this out.” It had made three full levels of what we called Bonk the Bros, and we were all laughing. It has seven levels now, with power-ups.
That night in bed I realized I’d just made essentially Angry Birds with about ten minutes of effort, just by thinking it and saying it. If I spent the next week on it, I have no doubt I could replicate the original. So what is happening?
Why Angry Birds was worth millions
Angry Birds took a huge engineering team and probably a massive investment, and it became a multi-million dollar empire with movies and plush toys. And I’d just made Bonk the Bros, which is basically the same game.
That doesn’t make Angry Birds worthless, because the game mechanics were never what made it worth millions. Lots of games used the same physics engine. Angry Birds came out at a lucky time, and if it launched today it probably wouldn’t have much to stand on. The value came from the brand, the idea, the story and the art direction, and probably from the relationships the people who started the company had.
Production is cheap for everyone now
A cost of production close to zero doesn’t mean there’s no value left in what we make for clients. It means you can’t lead with “I’m a web designer” or “I can code, design, animate or edit video” anymore. Those skills were already commodities. There was always someone who could code faster than you. Now everyone can be the fastest coder, whether or not the code is good. Selling yourself as the production person means almost nothing now.
The value is in owning the outcome. It’s in the relationship, your judgment and your responsibility for getting a client there, and in them trusting you to do it.
Why a client who could do it would still hire you
Your clients can use AI too. Most won’t be very good at it, and even the ones who are wouldn’t hire you for that. Someone who’s super good at AI wouldn’t hire me because I’m a little better at it than they are. Often they’re better at it than me.
Let’s say they run a studio building software for their clients. They know their email, website and socials need to be done, and they know they could deploy a bunch of AI agents to do it. But they’re busy with a lot of clients, and they’d rather not be the marketing department, even with AI. They’d rather be selling, understanding their clients’ problems and building software.
So they ask if they can hire me and my agency to own it. “I know you use AI. We all do. But I don’t want my team, human and agentic, to be split. I want to keep mine focused here. Just make my marketing good.”
When they ship a big project and want to make a big hurrah over the case study, I say, “Cool, leave it with me.” We do a quick call and I handle the rest. I split it into multiple posts and schedule it out over three months of content.
Sure, they could ask their AI to do it. But then they’re the marketing department on top of the production, the software and the client relationships.
Anyone can code, build automations, design and write now, and it costs next to nothing. The part I bring is owning that responsibility and the outcome.
Because I focus on that, my system and my methods, human and agentic, keep getting tuned across multiple clients. That’s a better use of the client’s time, tokens and energy than figuring out marketing too.
They also get regular meetings with me, once a week or once a month, where I can say, “Hey, I’ve got this crazy idea. Here’s what I think we should do. What do you think? Do I get your sign-off on it?”
Where your value is now
The cost of production has basically flatlined, and that’s good. But if your value was latched onto being the production person, that’s a dangerous place to be, because everyone can do production now, whether or not it’s any good. Owning the outcome and the relationship makes the human part even more important.
Saying “I’m the web designer” or “I’m the video editor” is sketchy now. Saying this is different: “I make your videos get you clients. I have a system I’ve developed using people and AI. It’s focused, it’s tuned and it’s always getting better. You could throw an AI agent at it yourself, but it’s not going to touch what I’ve invested in building this system out. Plug mine into yours, we’ll build a really good human connection on top of that, and you can trust me to own it for you.”
For the past few years we could kind of hide behind being the production person. Now we’re being forced to step up. You don’t get to hide behind being good at video editing or programming anymore. You have to work out where your actual value is. It is there, and you have it. You just need to understand it now.
This came up on a Build with Brad call.