How much should it cost to automate a task?

Work out what the task is costing you first

Before you think about the price of automating something, work out what doing it by hand costs. Take the hours it eats each week, times a rough hourly cost of the person doing it, times the fifty-odd weeks in a year. A task that takes one person half a day a week is not a small annoyance. It is thousands of pounds a year, every year.

That number is what you are really comparing the automation against. Not zero.

What automation actually costs to build

• A single, contained automation, like a form that files itself into a system, an email that sends itself, or a report that builds itself: often £1,500 to £4,000.
• Something that connects several tools together, or handles a fiddly process full of exceptions: more, and worth scoping properly first.

The price is driven by how many steps there are, how many tools have to talk to each other, and how messy the exceptions get. A clean, well-defined task is cheap to automate. A vague 'it depends what the customer says' process takes longer to pin down.

The bit that catches people out

The build is usually the small cost. The thing to check is what it runs on. Some automation platforms charge per task or a monthly fee, and at volume that adds up quickly. I build on free and low tiers wherever they fit, so a lot of automations cost pennies to run. But ask, because a cheap build on an expensive platform is not a cheap automation.

When it is worth it, and when it is not

Automate the thing that is repetitive, boring, follows the same steps every time, and happens often. That is where the money and the sanity are.

Do not automate something that changes every time, needs a human judgement in the middle, or only happens twice a year. The effort will cost more than just doing it. I will tell you honestly which side of that line your task sits on, because building the wrong automation helps neither of us.

The short version: if a task is stealing hours every week, automating it is one of the cheapest, highest-return things you can spend money on. The way to know your number is to show me the task.