It is the first question in every meeting and almost nobody answers it in writing. The result is that plenty of companies rule out automation because they imagine a figure nowhere near the real one, and others get a shock because they imagined the opposite.
Let us put numbers on it. These are the ranges we work with for small and mid-sized companies, and they are a useful reference even if you end up hiring someone else.
The three price brackets
Simple automation: €1,500 to €4,000. One process, two or three systems connected, clear rules. For example: every form submitted on your website creates the contact in the CRM, alerts the right salesperson and sends a confirmation email with the specific information that person asked for. Two to three weeks of work.
Automation with judgement: €4,000 to €12,000. This is where AI comes in, because the system has to interpret something unstructured. Classifying incoming email, extracting data from PDF invoices, deciding which department each request belongs to. It costs more because you have to train it, measure accuracy and build the oversight mechanisms. Four to eight weeks.
Custom system: from €12,000 upwards. When the process is specific to your company and no product covers it. You are building software with its own database, permissions, dashboard and maintenance. From here on, talk in phases rather than a single fixed price.
If someone quotes you a price before seeing your processes, they are not preparing an estimate — they are selling you a template.
What actually drives the cost up
Price is rarely driven by the technology. It is driven by four things, none of which appear in the brochure:
- Systems with no API. Vertical or legacy software you have to reach indirectly: scheduled exports, direct database access, a middle layer. It multiplies the integration work.
- Dirty data. Customer names written five different ways, fields used for something they were never meant for, years of duplicates. Cleaning it is part of the project and sometimes it is half of it.
- Rules nobody has written down. "It depends, Marta knows that one." When the criteria live in someone’s head, they have to be extracted, debated and written down before anything can be coded. That work gets billed, and it is worth it.
- Exceptions. The normal path automates quickly. The fifteen odd cases that show up three times a year are what eat the hours.
How to work out whether it pays off, in five minutes
You do not need a complicated spreadsheet. This is enough to know whether the conversation is worth continuing:
- Count how many times a day the task is done.
- Actually time it, once. Do not estimate: it almost always takes longer than people think.
- Multiply by working days per month to get monthly hours.
- Multiply those hours by the real hourly cost of whoever does it, including employer contributions.
- Compare that annual cost against the automation budget.
As a rule of thumb, if the system pays for itself in under twelve months it is a good investment. If it takes more than twenty-four, you are probably automating the wrong process: find another one before dropping the idea.
And there is a cost this calculation misses, usually the biggest one: errors. An order entered wrong, an invoice that goes missing, a customer nobody replied to. Those are not measured in hours, but they get paid for.
What to demand from any quote
- A clear statement of which process is being automated and what is excluded.
- A baseline measurement, so results can be compared afterwards.
- Code and documentation handed over, with no dependencies that lock you to the supplier.
- Clarity on what happens when the system fails and who finds out.
- Team training included, not billed as an extra.
If you want a reference for your specific case, tell us which process is costing you the most hours and we will give you an assessment, no strings attached. And if an off-the-shelf product suits you better than custom development, we will say so.