Most UK SME automation projects land between £3,000 and £8,000 for a full build, delivered in two to six weeks. A single automation joining two or three systems starts at £350. A written audit that tells you what to build first is £1,500, credited in full if you go on to build.
Below: the real bands, what pushes a quote up, and the arithmetic for working out whether a given job is worth automating at all — including when the answer is no.
Every engagement is quoted as one fixed number before work starts. These are the bands those numbers fall into.
£350 – £750
One workflow joining two or three systems: an enquiry that creates a record and notifies someone, a nightly report that builds and sends itself. £350 for a straightforward connection, £750 once AI is doing the reading and deciding.
You know exactly what you want and it is one job.
£1,500
A one-to-two week written diagnostic: your workflows mapped, opportunities ranked by return, ROI estimated per item, and a fixed-price quote for each. Credited in full against a build if you proceed within 60 days.
You know something is wrong but not which thing to fix first.
£1,500 – £3,000
A live view replacing a spreadsheet or a daily manual check. Price moves with how many sources feed it and whether it needs alerting and history.
One person’s daily routine is the only record you have.
£3,000 – £8,000
End-to-end automation of one real business process, across several systems, tested and deployed with your team trained on it. Two to six weeks. This is where most engagements land.
A whole process — quote to cash, enquiry to booking — is manual.
£8,000+
Several processes automated as one system, usually with AI agents making decisions and a human approving anything that touches money or a customer commitment.
The admin problem spans departments, not one desk.
from £1,500/mo
Monitoring, fixes, new workflows and a monthly strategy call. Rolling monthly, cancel anytime. Optional — every build is handed over working, documented and yours.
Your systems keep changing and someone needs to notice when one breaks.
You do not need us to do this sum. Take the hours a week the task swallows, multiply by what that person costs you per hour including employer costs, then by 46 working weeks. That is the annual cost of continuing to do it by hand.
Compare it to a one-off build price. If the job does not pay back inside about eighteen months, it usually is not worth automating yet — and we will say so on the call rather than quote you for it.
The figures below are real outcomes from systems we built. Savings are stated as actual costs eliminated or salary-equivalents of the manual work replaced.
Worked example
Real client outcomes
Two is cheap. Six is not, and the cost is in the joins, not the count.
Automating a tidy process is quick. Automating a messy one means fixing the mess first, and that is often the bigger job.
Most modern tools have one. Older or in-house systems sometimes do not, and working around that costs more.
Anything touching money, contracts or a customer promise needs approval steps, error handling and testing that a low-stakes workflow does not.
Reading messy, unstructured information is worth paying for. Using AI where a simple rule would do adds cost and unpredictability for nothing.
A tool one person uses is simpler to hand over than one used by three departments.
A fixed price moves the risk of a job overrunning from you to us. It also gives you a number you can take to a board or a budget holder without caveats, which an hourly estimate never is. If we scope it wrong, that is our problem to absorb, not a change request for you to sign.
The trade-off is that fixed pricing needs proper scoping first. That is the entire purpose of the free discovery call and, where the picture is genuinely unclear, the £1,500 Process Audit. Anyone quoting a complex build sight-unseen is guessing, and you will meet that guess again later as a variation.
Most UK SME automation projects fall between £3,000 and £8,000 for a full single-workflow build, delivered in two to six weeks. A single automation joining two or three systems starts at £350. Multi-system and multi-agent builds start at £8,000. A written process audit, which tells you what to build before you commit to building it, is £1,500 and is credited in full against a build if you proceed within 60 days.
Usually because they bill by the hour, which means they genuinely do not know the number until the work is finished. We quote a fixed price before starting, so the number is agreed before anyone commits. If a project is too vague to quote, that is a sign it needs an audit first, not an open-ended hourly engagement.
Multiply the hours a week the task takes by the loaded hourly cost of the person doing it, then by 46 working weeks. A task taking six hours a week from someone on £32,000 costs roughly £5,600 a year to keep doing by hand. If automating it costs £5,000 once, it pays back inside a year and keeps paying every year after. If the sum does not clear the cost, do not automate it — we will tell you when that is the case.
Most of the builds we quote pay back within six to eighteen months on time saved alone. One client had a full working day of manual checking replaced, worth roughly £27,000 a year against a build that cost a fraction of that. Payback is faster when the work is daily and slower when it is monthly, which is why the audit ranks opportunities by return rather than by how interesting they are.
For you, almost always. A fixed price moves the risk of a job taking longer than expected from you to us, and it makes the number something you can take to a board or a budget holder. Hourly billing rewards the supplier for being slow. The trade-off is that fixed pricing requires proper scoping upfront, which is what the discovery call and the audit are for.
Two kinds. Software subscriptions you may already pay for — a CRM, an automation platform, AI usage — which typically run from a few pounds to a few tens of pounds a month for an SME workload, and which we size before you commit. And optionally our retainer from £1,500/month if you want us monitoring and extending things. The retainer is not required: every build is handed over documented and working.
No. The Automation Agency is not currently VAT registered, so the quoted price is the total you pay.
Thirty minutes, free, no pitch. Describe what your team keeps doing by hand and you'll get an honest range on the call — including when the honest answer is that it isn't worth automating.
Prefer to talk now? 01246 923041 — Mon–Fri, 9am–5.30pm.
So we can come to the call with something useful rather than spending the first ten minutes working out who you are.