What twelve common business automations actually cost to build and run

Almost nobody in this industry publishes build costs. The stated reason is that every project is different, which is true and also true of builders, lawyers and accountants, all of whom manage to give you a range.

So here are our actual figures for the twelve automations small and mid-sized businesses ask us for most often. For each: what it involves, what we charge to build it, and roughly how many hours it gives back. What it costs to keep running afterwards is covered at the end. Every build figure below is a fixed price taken straight from our price list. These are our published rates, not market research. Another firm may quote differently, and a quote well outside these bands is worth asking questions about in either direction.

Sales and marketing operations

1. Lead capture and routing, $1,500 setup

Form or inbound email into the CRM: deduplicate against existing companies, enrich, apply territory or service-line routing rules, assign an owner, notify them, and send an acknowledgement. Unclassifiable submissions go to a human rather than being guessed at.

It is a simple build because it is usually two or three systems with good APIs. The design work is in routing rules that are genuinely complicated: round-robin with capacity limits, or ownership that depends on an account hierarchy.

Where the value actually is: not the hours. It is response time going from hours to under a minute, including overnight, which materially changes inbound conversion.

2. Quote and proposal generation, $2,500 setup

An intake form populates a document from a maintained template, pulls pricing from a single source, logs the opportunity, and routes for signature. The work is in real pricing logic: tiered rates, volume breaks, multi-currency.

The hidden benefit: pricing stops being copied from whichever old proposal was nearest. Most firms at this size have quoted an out-of-date rate at least once.

3. CRM hygiene and enrichment, $1,500 setup

Continuous deduplication, company data enrichment, stale-record flagging, and normalization of the fields your reporting depends on. Enrichment APIs charge per lookup, paid directly to the vendor.

Be careful here: this is the one on the list most likely to be a symptom rather than a problem. If records are dirty because three teams enter data three ways, fix that first. Otherwise you are paying to clean up after a process you could change for free.

Finance and back office

4. Supplier invoice capture and matching, $3,500 setup

The largest single pool of recoverable hours in most businesses with a supply chain, and correspondingly the most involved build. Invoices are read on arrival, line items extracted, matched against purchase orders, coded, and posted. Anything failing validation (price variance, missing PO, unknown supplier) goes to a review queue with the reason attached.

The effort depends heavily on how many suppliers send genuinely unstructured documents and how strict your matching tolerance is. Three-way matching against goods receipts is the hardest version.

The trap: anyone pricing this as a starter automation has not accounted for the review queue, the exception handling, or the reconciliation. Full teardown of how this one is built: the supplier invoice workflow, step by step.

5. Expense processing, $2,000 setup

Receipt capture, OCR extraction, policy checks, approval routing by amount, and posting to the ledger. Straightforward unless your policy has many conditional rules, in which case it becomes an exception-logic project.

6. Collections chasing, $2,500 setup

Staged reminders on an ageing schedule, escalating to a human at a defined threshold, with payment status checked before every send so nobody gets chased for an invoice they already paid.

Highest return on this list, and not because of the hours. Consistent chasing typically pulls cash collection forward, and the working-capital effect usually dwarfs the labor saving. It is often a good place to start.

7. Order to invoice, $3,500 setup

Completed work or shipped order triggers invoice creation with the right coding, references and attachments, then reconciles the payment when it arrives. Harder when it spans a field-service or fulfillment system with a weak API.

Operations and delivery

8. Client onboarding, $1,500 setup

Signature triggers folder creation, project setup from template, CRM status change, first invoice, channel and access provisioning, and a pre-drafted welcome message queued for a person to send.

Best first project for most businesses, not because it saves the most but because the before-and-after is visible to everyone within a fortnight. First automations have to earn trust as well as time.

9. Recurring reporting, $2,000 setup

Numbers pulled from source on a schedule, assembled, and delivered already readable. Or replaced entirely by a live dashboard, which is often cheaper and better.

Ask the deletion question first. A meaningful share of recurring reports are read by nobody. Turn it off for a month before automating it. See what should not be automated.

10. Two-way system sync, $12,000 setup

Genuine bidirectional synchronization between two systems, with conflict rules, loop prevention, and reconciliation for drift. The most under-estimated item on this list: copying records one way is easy, and keeping two systems honest with each other is not.

Hours returned varies enormously because it usually replaces a weekly export rather than a daily task. The real gain is data being current instead of six days stale.

Where AI is genuinely involved

11. Inbound email triage, $3,500 setup

Classification by intent, detail extraction, priority scoring and routing, with low-confidence messages going to a review queue. One of the few places a language model clearly earns its cost, because the input is unstructured by nature.

Why it costs more than a comparable workflow: roughly a third of the build is assembling an evaluation set from your real historical email and measuring accuracy against it before launch. Skipping that is how you get a demo that impresses in a meeting and fails in week three.

12. Document review against a checklist, $3,500 setup

Contracts, tenders or specifications read against your own criteria, with relevant clauses quoted and located rather than summarized away. Vendor model costs are the widest on this list because long documents consume a lot of tokens.

Only worth it at volume. Reviewing four tenders a year does not justify this. Forty does.

Four patterns worth noticing

The setup band is narrower than people expect

Eleven of the twelve sit between $1,500 and $3,500 to set up. The band is narrow in both directions for the same reason: every system carries the same fixed work regardless of ambition: scoping, error handling, testing against your real cases, parallel running, documentation and handover. That is why the floor is $499 for the starter rather than nothing, and why only the connected back office, which is really several systems at once, reaches $12,000. Any three or more systems bought together get 20% off the setup, and the packages are four ready-made bundles.

Maintenance is a choice, so make it on purpose

None of these carries a monthly fee from us. Every setup includes 30 days of support after go-live; after that you choose how to maintain it. Pay as you go costs nothing a month, and every change is billed at $175, with fixes billed as changes. Or you take a plan, per account rather than per system: Growth at $700 a month includes six changes plus monitoring and fixes, and Scale at $1,800 includes twenty. Separately you pay the vendors for platform and model usage, almost always under $150 a month. The exception is anything AI-heavy at volume, and even then it is usually tens of dollars rather than hundreds. The recurring cost that actually matters is maintenance, not compute. Note the shape this makes. A $3,500 system on pay as you go with one change a month costs $5,600 in its first year. The same system on Growth costs $11,900, but the plan covers every system on the account, and it is cheaper than pay as you go once you would ask for more than four changes a month. The setup price is the number people negotiate; how often you will want things changed is the number that decides which way to maintain it, and it belongs in the decision from the start rather than as an afterthought.

The hours are the smaller half of the value

Look at collections chasing: four to ten hours a month, but the working-capital effect of collecting a week earlier typically exceeds it several times over. Or lead routing, where sub-minute response changes conversion. If you evaluate only on labor saved, you will reject projects that were worth doing and approve ones that were not.

Two-way sync is where estimates go wrong

It is the item on the list most often under-scoped, and the one people most often expect to be cheap. "Just keep them in step" describes a genuinely hard distributed-systems problem, and any quote that treats it as a copy operation should worry you.

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Full pricing, including what moves a quote up or down, is on the pricing page. If you want a real number for a specific process, the fastest route is thirty minutes on the phone. Tell us the systems and the volume and we can usually name the exact price on the call.