The automation department you cannot justify hiring
Most companies between 20 and 200 people have enough automation work to matter and not enough to fill a full-time engineer's calendar. So the work does not get done, or it gets done badly by someone with another job. We exist to fill that gap.
What we are, precisely
Not an agency — agencies sell projects and move on. Not a software vendor — we do not have a product to sell you and we take no commission on the tools we recommend. We are a function you rent: the same thing an internal automation team would be, without the salary, the recruitment or the risk of them leaving in eighteen months.
Practically, that means we behave like staff rather than suppliers. We learn how your business actually runs before proposing anything. We build inside your accounts, not ours. We tell you when the answer is "do not build this." And we are still reachable when a vendor changes an API two years later.
Why the positioning matters
Every business that reaches around twenty people discovers the same thing: the work that used to be handled informally now needs a system, and nobody owns making that happen. Operations people are busy operating. Developers, if you have any, are on the product. Automation lands on whoever is most willing.
Hiring for it properly costs $80,000 to $130,000 a year fully loaded, and the honest truth is most companies of that size would not keep that person busy. Which leaves renting the function as the only sensible option — but the market for that is mostly agencies who will happily sell you six workflows you did not need.
We would rather sell you three that you did.
How we make decisions
- Measure before building. If we cannot say what a process costs today, we cannot claim to have saved anything.
- Boring beats clever. A simple flow that runs for three years beats an elegant one nobody can maintain.
- Deterministic before AI. Rules are cheaper, faster and more predictable. Models go where language and judgement are genuinely required, and nowhere else.
- Humans approve consequences. Anything that spends money, signs something or contacts a customer keeps an approval step by default.
- Failure is a designed state. Every workflow has defined behaviour for a dead API, malformed data, or an expired credential.
- No lock-in, ever. Your accounts, your credentials, your documentation. If you leave, nothing breaks.
Things we do not do
- Resell software licences or take affiliate commission
- Host your automations on our own infrastructure
- Bill hourly on build work
- Hide pricing behind a discovery call
- Put an AI model where a rule would do
- Quote a project we do not think will pay for itself
Where we work well, and where we do not
We are a good fit if…
- You are roughly 20 to 200 people, or a smaller team with disproportionate operational complexity
- Your processes are stable enough to be worth encoding
- Someone senior can make decisions and sign off scope
- You want to own what gets built rather than rent it indefinitely
- You would rather hear "do not automate this" than be sold something
We are the wrong choice if…
- You need a single two-step Zap — build it yourself, genuinely
- Your processes are changing monthly and nothing has settled yet
- You want the cheapest possible price and are comparing on hourly rate
- You are looking for staff augmentation rather than delivered outcomes
- You want AI in the product because it should have AI in it
Where we tend to fit best
Professional services
Agencies, consultancies and engineering practices. Proposal generation, project setup, timesheets, client reporting and invoicing.
Ecommerce & retail
Order routing, multi-channel inventory sync, supplier communication, returns handling and margin reporting.
Real estate
Lead routing, listing syndication, document collection, transaction milestone tracking and commission calculation.
Logistics
Shipment status updates, carrier rate comparison, proof-of-delivery capture, exception alerts and billing reconciliation.
Healthcare administration
Intake forms, scheduling, referral handling and insurance paperwork — with careful attention to how data is handled.
Finance & back office
Invoice capture and PO matching, expense processing, reconciliation prep, month-end packs and collections chasing.
Start with a conversation
Thirty minutes on what is slow, manual or breaking. If we are not the right fit we will tell you that on the call rather than after a proposal.