“How much does automation cost?” is the first question on every call, and most agencies dodge it. Here are the real 2026 numbers — including ours — what drives them up, and the situations where the honest answer is “don’t bother.”

The five price bands

DIY tools (£0–£100/month). Zapier, Make, ChatGPT. If your problem is one simple hop — new form entry, send an email — do it yourself. You don’t need us and we’ll tell you that on the call.

A freelancer (£500–£2,000). Fine for a contained job. The risk isn’t the build, it’s month three: the freelancer moves on and nobody knows how it works. Ask who maintains it before you ask the price.

A studio build (£4,000–£8,000, fixed). This is where we sit. One painful workflow — quoting, document handling, follow-ups, lead capture — mapped, built around your existing tools, tested with real work, and handed over so it runs without us. A typical sales-admin system lands around £5k.

An agency programme (£15,000+). You’re paying for account managers, workshops, and a deck before anyone builds anything. Sometimes justified at enterprise scale. For a team of 5–100, usually not.

An internal hire (£35,000+/year). A competent ops or automation hire costs that before they’ve fixed anything — and good ones are hard to find and harder to keep.

What actually drives the price

  • How many systems have to talk to each other. One inbox and one spreadsheet is cheap. A CRM, an accounts package, and a 15-year-old industry tool is not.
  • How messy the inputs are. Clean structured data is easy. PDFs written by forty different suppliers need real extraction work.
  • What happens when the system is unsure. A proper build routes edge cases to a human instead of guessing. Designing that judgement layer is where the skill is.

The maths that matters

On a live document-extraction build we ship for a UK supply-chain operator, the system saves a conservative 30 minutes per document. At even 20 documents a week and £20/hour, that’s roughly £10,000 a year back — from one workflow. That’s the sum to run on your own numbers: hours saved × hourly cost × 52. If it doesn’t clear the build price inside a year, don’t build it.

When automation isn’t worth it

If the process changes every month, automate nothing — stabilise it first. If it happens twice a year, a checklist beats a system. And if nobody on the team owns the process today, an automated version of chaos is still chaos. We’ve told people all three of these on paid audits, and it’s why the audit is fixed-fee: from £750, and if there’s nothing worth building, you find out for £750 instead of £5,000.