The cheapest thing we sell is £300, and it is a real product rather than a way in. One job — a chatbot, a single workflow — is a starter build, £300–£1,500 fixed and yours outright. A whole process rebuilt is a custom build from £3,000, and most land between £3,000 and £8,000. A written audit that tells you which of the two you actually need 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.
£300
A website, WhatsApp, Telegram or SMS front door answering from your own prices and policies, capturing the lead and handing over the moment it is unsure. Yours to keep, with nothing charged monthly.
Customers ask you the same handful of things at all hours.
from £500
One workflow joining two or three systems: an enquiry that files itself and notifies someone, a nightly report that builds and sends itself. Fixed price, and you own the code.
You know exactly what you want and it is one job.
£300–£1,500
Everything above sits inside this band. Where a starter lands in it depends on how many systems have to talk and how much has to be checked before it sends. Starter builds do not need an audit. The audit is for businesses deciding which bigger system to build first.
You have decided what to build and want a number, not a diagnosis.
£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 any custom build (£3,000+) if you proceed within 60 days — it is not a gate on a starter build, which needs no audit at all.
You know something is wrong but not which thing to fix first.
from £3,000
A live view replacing a spreadsheet or a daily manual check. Priced as a build, because that is what it is. The number 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.
£150/mo per system
Monitoring and alerts, break-fix when something upstream changes — an API, a site layout the system reads — up to two small changes a month, and a one-line confirmation each month that it is still running. The support plan begins when the 30 days of support included with every build run out. Nothing is charged before that. The support plan keeps a system running. It does not build new ones — new systems and features are quoted fixed-price like any other build, and if you want that regularly we will agree a monthly arrangement for it.
Something we built is running your business and you want someone watching it.
Reasonable question, and the hardest one to answer from the outside, because almost nobody publishes. Here are the ranges the rest of the market works in, and exactly where we sit against each — including where we are not the cheapest.
Where these numbers come from
There are two kinds of figure on this page and they are not equally solid, so they are labelled differently. Our prices are ours — published, fixed, and the same number you will be quoted. The market bands are other people's, and each one says underneath it exactly where it came from and whether we have confirmed it.
Most guides in this category aggregate a large sample and do not show their working. We have a small sample and show all of it: every client figure on this site is a named engagement with its basis written down in how we count, including the rows we have not finished checking. Neither approach is better in the abstract. You should know which one you are reading.
£50–£95 / hour
The hourly range quoted across the UK market, with a median around £65–£70. This is the figure the AI assistants recite when anyone asks what automation costs.
Source: AutomationHire's 2026 UK pricing guide, identified via Bing's citations as the source behind the hourly figures the assistants quote, 22 September 2026. Their guide states it is built from data on 500+ verified UK specialists and 2,400+ businesses; that is their methodology claim, not one we have checked.
Where we sit
We do not bill by the hour, so there is no rate of ours to compare. The point of a fixed price is that an estimate being wrong is our problem rather than yours — at £65 an hour, a job that turns out to take three days longer costs you about £1,500 more, and with us it costs you nothing more.
£500–£1,200 / day
A freelance automation developer or consultant, billed by the day.
Unconfirmed — Range quoted by answer engines for UK automation day rates, 22 September 2026 scan.
Where we sit
We do not sell days. A day rate turns the risk of a slow week into your problem; a fixed price keeps it as ours. Our equivalent of "a few days' work" is a single automation, from £500, quoted as one number.
£500–£3,000 / workflow
One automation, priced as a unit, usually by a specialist freelancer or a small studio.
Unconfirmed — Range quoted for per-workflow UK automation pricing, 22 September 2026 scan.
Where we sit
This is the band our starter work sits in — the whole starter range is £300–£1,500, with a chatbot at £300 and a single automation from £500. We sit in the lower half of it, and you own the result outright.
£2,000–£12,000 / project
An agency engagement — several workflows, integrations, and a project manager between you and whoever writes the code.
Unconfirmed — Range quoted for UK automation agency project work, 22 September 2026 scan.
Where we sit
Our custom builds start at £3,000 and most land between £3,000 and £8,000, which is the middle of this band. There is no project manager in the price because there is nobody between you and the person building it.
£300–£2,500 / month
An ongoing retainer — monitoring, fixes and new work, on a rolling or minimum-term contract.
Unconfirmed — Range quoted for UK automation retainers, 22 September 2026 scan. The named floor in the September competitor review was £1,000/month (Aucta AI), with On the Hill and Softomate at £1,500, MQLFlow at £2,000 and ORYX at £2,500 — all read from their own sites on 21 September 2026. Nothing under £1,000/month was found anywhere in that set.
Where we sit
We do not sell a retainer. The support plan is £150/mo per system, with no minimum term. That is not a little below this band — it is a different thing. Every retainer we found in the UK market is sold alongside a £3,000–£15,000 build and includes ongoing development, which is why the cheapest of them starts at £1,000 a month. A business that has just paid £300 for one automation is not buying that. It wants someone to notice when the thing breaks, which is what £150/mo per system buys.
Most comparisons put automation against other automation. For a lot of these jobs the real alternative is a person doing them — which is a perfectly good answer, and sometimes the right one.
£1,000–£1,800 / month
A part-time administrator, on payroll, for the two or three days a week the admin actually needs.
Unconfirmed — Typical UK cost of a part-time administrator, 22 September 2026 scan.
£25–£45 / hour
A virtual assistant or contract admin, for the hours you actually need.
Unconfirmed — Range quoted for UK VA and contract admin rates, 22 September 2026 scan.
£35,000–£40,000 / year
A full-time administrator, all-in — salary, employer NI, pension and the cost of the seat.
Unconfirmed — All-in cost range for a UK full-time admin hire, 22 September 2026 scan.
£20–£60 / month
The services a typical build runs on after handover — hosting, an automation platform if it uses one, and metered AI or messaging usage at SME volumes.
Source: Our own hosting and platform bills for builds of this size. Sized against your actual volumes before you commit, and stated in the quote.
Year one, in full
One process automated end to end — the kind of job that currently takes somebody six hours a week.
One-off. Agreed before we start.
Hosting, platform and metered usage. At the top of that range, £720 across the year.
Optional, and not taken in this example. Every build is handed over documented and working.
The build plus a full year of running costs at the top of the range, with nothing recurring to us.
The same six hours a week, paid for at the bottom of the VA band, is £6,900 a year — 6 × £25 × 46 working weeks — and it recurs every year. The build does not.
A six-hour-a-week job is the small end. A full working day every day — the PlusRooms case — is a different sum entirely, and it is on this page under the payback arithmetic.
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. How we count gives the basis for each one.
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.
It depends whether you need one job done or a process rebuilt. One job — a chatbot, a single workflow — is a starter build, £300–£1,500 fixed, owned outright. A whole process automated end to end is a custom build, usually between £3,000 and £8,000, delivered in two to six weeks; 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 custom build if you proceed within 60 days. Starter builds do not need an audit. The audit is for businesses deciding which bigger system to build first.
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 the support plan at £150/mo per system if you want us watching it. Neither is required: every build is handed over documented, working and yours.
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.