It's the first question every business owner asks, and the one most automation companies dodge hardest: what does this actually cost?
Here's the honest answer, with real numbers, so you can walk into any conversation — with me or anyone else — knowing roughly what you should be paying.
The short version
In the UK in 2026, most small-business automation work falls into three bands:
| Type of project | Typical UK cost | Typical timescale |
|---|---|---|
| Simple workflow automation (connecting two or three tools, removing copy-paste) | A few hundred to ~£2,000 | Days, not weeks |
| AI-powered automation (an assistant that answers enquiries, drafts quotes, reads documents) | £2,000–£8,000 | 2–6 weeks |
| Custom multi-system builds (several systems connected, reporting, error handling, training) | £5,000–£30,000 | 1–3 months |
Industry pricing guides put most UK SMEs' first automation project between £5,000 and £30,000, with simple tool-based workflows costing far less. Enterprise systems run into six figures — but if you're reading this, you almost certainly don't need one.
What actually drives the price
- How many systems are involved. Connecting a contact form to your CRM is cheap. Connecting your CRM, accounts package, job-management tool and email — with data that has to stay consistent across all four — is where cost (and value) climbs.
- How messy your data is. If your customer records live in three spreadsheets with three different spellings of the same company, part of the project is cleaning that up. Worth doing, but it's real work.
- What happens when it goes wrong. A proper build includes error handling — what the system does when an email doesn't arrive or an API is down. Cheap builds skip this, and it's exactly why cheap builds quietly break three months in.
- AI or no AI. AI components (reading documents, drafting replies) add running costs — usually pennies per task — and more testing time, because the outputs need checking against your real-world cases.
The cost nobody puts on the quote
Whatever you pay to build an automation, compare it against the cost of not building it. A task that takes a staff member 5 hours a week at £15/hour costs you roughly £3,900 a year, every year — before you count the errors, the delays and the things that don't get done because everyone's busy retyping.
That's why a £3,000 automation that removes that task pays for itself in well under a year, and everything after that is margin. (I've written a full guide on calculating automation ROI properly.)
How to avoid overpaying
- Never start with a big bang. Anyone proposing a six-month "transformation programme" as your first project is selling to their pipeline, not your problem. Start with one high-value workflow, prove it works, then expand.
- Ask what happens after handover. Documentation, training and support should be included. A black box you can't operate isn't an asset, it's a liability.
- Get the savings estimate in writing before the price. If the builder can't tell you what the automation saves, they can't justify what it costs.
And if you're weighing up doing it yourself with tools like Zapier instead — sometimes that's genuinely the right call. I've written about when DIY makes sense and when it doesn't.
Want to know what automation would actually save your business?
I offer a free 30-minute call: you talk me through your week, I find the time leaks, and you get a plain-English report of what's worth automating and what it's costing you not to. No pitch, no obligation — the report is yours either way.
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