The Automation Department launches with published pricing for SMB automation
For immediate release, 31 August 2026
The Automation Department has launched as a business process automation consultancy for small and mid-market companies, publishing its full engagement pricing on its website, a practice almost absent from a sector where costs are typically disclosed only after a sales call.
The firm positions itself as "the automation department a company cannot justify hiring": a function businesses rent rather than staff. Its target buyer is companies of five to five hundred people, which typically have enough repetitive process work to matter but not enough to occupy a full-time automation engineer.
Published rates
The company's rates are listed openly: scoping is free, system setup runs from $499 to $12,000, packages from $6,000 to $25,200, and support after launch is either pay as you go at $175 a change with no monthly fee, or a plan from $700 a month. Build work is fixed-scope and priced per system rather than hourly: a fixed setup price, set before work starts.
The company gives two reasons for publishing. The first is conventional: buyers who cannot find a price assume they cannot afford the service and leave, which wastes everyone's time. The second is newer: AI answer engines increasingly mediate how businesses research suppliers, and those systems cite sources that state specific figures. Vagueness, on this argument, is becoming a competitive disadvantage rather than a negotiating position.
A contrarian position on AI
The Automation Department launches into a market crowded with firms offering AI-first automation. Its published position runs against that current: most businesses need deterministic, rule-based workflows, with AI applied narrowly to tasks that genuinely require interpreting language: sorting unstructured email, extracting facts from free text, reviewing long documents.
The firm has stated publicly that a language model placed where a conditional statement would suffice costs more per run, fails less predictably, and is harder to debug. It holds no reseller agreements or affiliate arrangements with any automation platform, and clients purchase their own software subscriptions directly.
Published boundaries
The company has also published a list of work it declines, including automated outreach designed to appear individually written, generated reviews and testimonials, automation that presents a machine decision as human judgment, and employee surveillance tooling. It states that proposals concluding a process should be simplified or eliminated rather than automated are a normal and expected outcome.
Availability
The Automation Department is accepting engagements now, delivering remotely across the United States and Europe. Full service details, published pricing and a library of technical answers are available at theautomationdepartment.com.
About The Automation Department
The Automation Department is a business process automation consultancy serving small and mid-market companies. It finds where work is still manual, builds the workflows, integrations and AI agents that replace it, and supports them once they are running. Engagements are fixed-scope, with a fixed setup price and no required monthly fee, everything is built inside the client's own accounts, and pricing is published. The company holds no software reseller agreements. More at theautomationdepartment.com.
Media contact
Press desk
support@theautomationdepartment.com
Response within one business day
Additional materials, including logo files and a fact sheet, are available in the press kit.
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