What the price of automating a small business depends on

A simple automation — syncing data between two tools, generating a standard document, pulling data from invoices — usually runs between €1,500 and €4,000. A system connecting five tools with decision logic can multiply that by five or ten. There's no list price: there's a price per project.

So when someone gives you a figure without having looked at how you work, that figure means nothing. It's like asking for a renovation quote over the phone with no one having seen the house.

What moves the price isn't the brand of the tool, it's the complexity of your process: how many systems have to be connected, how many exceptions it has ('except when the client is from abroad', 'apart from August'), and how much has to be tidied up before anything can be automated.

A clean, repetitive process is cheap to automate. A process full of special cases only you know about costs more, because half the project is putting it in order.

An honest quote breaks out the parts: diagnosis, build, testing, launch, training and maintenance. Each with its own cost, and the recurring ones (maintenance, licenses) flagged for what they are: expenses that repeat every month.

What you shouldn't pay for is hot air: features you won't use, 'just in case' integrations, or expensive maintenance for something that barely changes. Part of a good diagnosis is trimming the project down to what actually saves you time.

The math is simple: how many hours a month it saves you, times what that hour costs you, against what you pay. When the process is well chosen, the investment usually pays back in a few months. You can run that math with your own numbers in our savings calculator before asking anyone for a quote.