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 would charge to build it, what it costs to run each month, and roughly how many hours it gives back. 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.
Hours returned is what we typically observe for a business doing that process at moderate volume — say a few hundred transactions a month. Yours will differ. The point of an audit is to measure your number rather than assume ours.
Sales and marketing operations
| Automation | Build | Run / month | Hours back / month |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Lead capture and routing | $8,000 – $11,000 | $20 – $50 | 8 – 15 |
| 2. Quote and proposal generation | $9,000 – $14,000 | $20 – $60 | 6 – 14 |
| 3. CRM hygiene and enrichment | $8,000 – $13,000 | $40 – $120 | 4 – 10 |
1. Lead capture and routing — $8,000 to $11,000
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.
The cost sits at the low end because it is usually two or three systems with good APIs. It rises when routing rules 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 — $9,000 to $14,000
An intake form populates a document from a maintained template, pulls pricing from a single source, logs the opportunity, and routes for signature. Higher end if pricing involves real calculation — 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 Most firms at this size have quoted an out-of-date rate at least once.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 — $8,000 to $13,000
Continuous deduplication, company data enrichment, stale-record flagging, and normalisation of the fields your reporting depends on. Running cost is higher than most because enrichment APIs charge per lookup.
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 monthly to clean up after a process you could change for free.
Finance and back office
| Automation | Build | Run / month | Hours back / month |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4. Supplier invoice capture and matching | $14,000 – $22,000 | $50 – $150 | 15 – 40 |
| 5. Expense processing | $9,000 – $14,000 | $30 – $80 | 5 – 12 |
| 6. Collections chasing | $8,000 – $12,000 | $15 – $40 | 4 – 10 |
| 7. Order to invoice | $12,000 – $20,000 | $30 – $80 | 10 – 25 |
4. Supplier invoice capture and matching — $14,000 to $22,000
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 range is wide because it depends heavily on how many suppliers send genuinely unstructured documents and how strict your matching tolerance is. Three-way matching against goods receipts sits at the top of the range.
The trap: anyone quoting $6,000 for this 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 — $9,000 to $14,000
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 wearing an expenses costume.
6. Collections chasing — $8,000 to $12,000
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 labour saving. This is the one we most often recommend first.
7. Order to invoice — $12,000 to $20,000
Completed work or shipped order triggers invoice creation with the right coding, references and attachments, then reconciles the payment when it arrives. Higher end when it spans a field-service or fulfilment system with a weak API.
Operations and delivery
| Automation | Build | Run / month | Hours back / month |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8. Client onboarding | $9,000 – $15,000 | $20 – $50 | 6 – 14 |
| 9. Recurring reporting | $8,000 – $13,000 | $20 – $60 | 4 – 12 |
| 10. Two-way system sync | $15,000 – $28,000 | $30 – $90 | Varies |
8. Client onboarding — $9,000 to $15,000
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 — $8,000 to $13,000
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 — $15,000 to $28,000
Genuine bidirectional synchronisation 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
| Automation | Build | Run / month | Hours back / month |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11. Inbound email triage | $10,000 – $16,000 | $40 – $120 | 10 – 25 |
| 12. Document review against a checklist | $12,000 – $20,000 | $50 – $200 | Varies widely |
11. Inbound email triage — $10,000 to $16,000
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 — $12,000 to $20,000
Contracts, tenders or specifications read against your own criteria, with relevant clauses quoted and located rather than summarised away. Running cost is 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 build cost band is narrower than people expect
Eleven of the twelve start between $8,000 and $15,000. The floor exists because every build carries the same fixed overhead regardless of ambition: scoping, error handling, testing, parallel running, documentation and handover. That overhead is roughly $6,000 of work, which is why sub-$5,000 projects are not viable — you would be dropping the parts that make it survive.
Running costs are lower than people fear
Almost everything here runs for 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 — which is the argument for a support arrangement, whether that is us or someone internal.
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 labour 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 only item on the list that regularly exceeds $25,000, and the only one clients consistently 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.
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 place it within a few thousand dollars.
Want a number for your specific process?
Tell us the systems and the volume. Thirty minutes, no charge, and a realistic figure at the end of it.