Which automation do I need?
Five questions, and it names the item on the price list that fits, including when the honest answer is that you should build it yourself, or not build it at all.
Most people arrive knowing something is slow and not knowing what to buy. The gap between a $499 starter automation and a $5,000 voice agent is large, and the difference is not budget. It is what the work actually involves.
This maps your answers onto the published menu. It will tell you to spend nothing when nothing is the right answer.
1. What sets the work off?
2. How many systems does it touch?
3. Does someone have to read something and understand it?
4. Can you write the rule down in one sentence?
5. How often does it happen?
What fits
The logic it uses
No black box. This is the same order we work through on a scoping call, and you can apply it yourself in about a minute.
- Is it frequent enough to matter? Monthly work rarely pays back regardless of what it is. Frequency decides more cases than everything else combined.
- Is the process settled? If the rule keeps changing, automating encodes a shape you are about to abandon. Wait.
- Are inbound calls involved? Voice is its own build, because latency, speech recognition and interruption handling are real engineering.
- Does it need language understood? If yes, an AI agent. If the decision follows rules you can state, a workflow does it deterministically, cheaper, with no chance of invention.
- Are there documents to read? Extraction, validation and a review queue for what fails the check.
- How many systems? Two is a starter automation. Three or more is a multi-step workflow, because each system is another API, another credential and another failure mode.
Build it yourself, and do not build it. A two-step connection between two modern apps is an afternoon's work in Zapier or Make, and if you have somebody willing to own it, that is the right answer. A process that runs monthly usually should not be automated at all. This tool will say both.
What it cannot tell you
It works from five answers, and a scoping call works from watching the process. The gap between those two is where estimates move, and it is nearly always exceptions: the customer handled differently, the approval that is technically required and always skipped, the second spreadsheet nobody mentioned. See the exception problem.
So treat the output as the right starting category rather than a quote. The price attached to it is real and fixed, but which category you are in can change once somebody looks properly, usually in the direction of one tier up, occasionally down.
Got your answer?
Bring it to a call and we can usually price the work on the spot. Thirty minutes, no charge, and a written proposal within two business days.
You will talk to Fayez or Kareem. Nobody else.