What does AI automation cost? An honest picture

Honest answer up front: AI automation has no fixed price tag. It depends on what you're automating, how many systems are involved and how polished it needs to be. But you can still get a realistic picture of it, and that's exactly what this page gives, no sales pitch.

What drives the cost

• Complexity of the task: forwarding a single email is cheaper than a process with ten decision points
• Number of connections: every system that has to take part takes time to hook up cleanly
• How critical it is: business-critical automation calls for error handling, logging and monitoring; that's extra work that pays for itself later
• Building yourself or having it built: doing it yourself mainly costs your own time; outsourcing costs money but gets you something stable faster

Two kinds of cost

One-off: the building itself. For a first, well-defined automation that's often a few thousand euros. If you start yourself with no-code tools, that cost is mainly your own hours.

Recurring: subscriptions to tools, usage of an AI model (often per operation), and maintenance. By self-hosting you push down the tool costs, but you take on the management yourself.

The payback time

The nice thing about automation is that the sum is usually simple. Does a task now take 5 hours a week, and is an hour worth 40 euros internally? Then that's about 10,000 euros a year. An automation of a few thousand euros that largely takes that away pays for itself within months, and keeps saving after that.

Watch out: not every task is worth it. Something you do once a quarter usually can't be automated profitably. The gain is in the daily and weekly manual work.

What it costs in your case

The real answer depends on your situation. We'd rather give a well-founded estimate after one conversation than a meaningless figure up front. See how outsourcing works, or not sure yet what exactly you want to automate? Then first read what AI automation is.