What does it cost to automate processes in a small or mid-sized company?

Search for “how much does process automation cost” and you get either “it depends” or a contact form. Neither helps when you are trying to work out whether a conversation is worth starting. This article gives the numbers I agree with my own clients.

A caveat first. I am describing the Polish SME market, projects run by an independent consultant or a small studio, and net amounts. A large integrator usually charges two to four times as much for the same scope, because it carries a structure that isn’t there in my case.

The short answer

A single, well-defined automation (one process, two or three systems to connect) costs €1,500–3,000 net. A project covering several related processes in one area of the company usually costs €3,750–10,000 net. Above that you are no longer automating but building a system, and that is priced differently.

If someone gives you a price without talking about your process, they are selling you a licence for a tool, not an implementation. That can be a good choice. Just don’t mistake one for the other.

Four things that decide the price

How many connection points there are, and how good they are. What matters isn’t how many systems you have, but how many of them have a sensible API. Connecting two services with proper documentation takes days. Getting the same data out of a program that only exports a CSV file to a network drive can take as long as the rest of the project put together.

How settled the process is. Automating a process that every employee runs a little differently starts with agreeing what it should look like. That is organisational work, not technical work, and it can cost more than the code. If you have a written procedure and everyone follows it, you are halfway there.

What an error costs. An automation that makes a mistake once in a hundred runs when booking a meeting costs an apology. One that makes a mistake once in a hundred runs on an invoice or a shipment costs far more, so it needs validation, logs, exception handling and a way to correct things by hand. That difference can double the price of the same flow.

Who will maintain it. A solution run by someone non-technical needs an interface, error messages in their language and documentation. A solution handed to your own IT team can be plainer and cheaper.

Three ranges that cover most projects

€1,500–3,000: one process. An example: incoming cost invoices taken from e-mail, their data read, written into the accounting system, and the approver notified. Two to three weeks of work, delivered in iterations, with the first working run usually after a week.

€3,750–10,000: one area of the company. Several processes that share data: offers, orders, scheduling and invoicing. This is where a shared data layer, permissions and a real staged plan come in. Six to twelve weeks, but the first results still arrive after two or three.

Above €10,000: a system project. If a quote comes out higher, it usually means the scope hasn’t been properly understood yet and needs narrowing first. In that case I suggest a process audit, from €1,100 net. It ends with a list of processes ranked by benefit against cost, and very often 80% of the benefit turns out to sit in two items from the first range.

The costs no offer shows

The price of an implementation isn’t the total cost of ownership. Three items to keep in mind before you sign:

• Platform subscriptions. Make, n8n Cloud, Zapier or a language-model provider: roughly €10 to €200 a month, depending on volume. If you host it yourself, you pay for a server and for someone’s time instead.
• Your team’s time. Workshops, testing, correcting descriptions. Realistically 10–25 hours on the client’s side for a project in the first range. It is a cost, even if it never appears on an invoice.
• Maintenance. APIs change, providers retire endpoints, the company changes its process. It is sensible to assume 10–20% of the implementation’s value per year for maintenance, whether you buy it as a service or do it yourself.

How to check that it pays

A simple calculation is enough in most cases. Work out how many hours a month the process takes today, multiply by the full cost of an employee’s hour (not the gross wage, the employer’s cost), and subtract the hours that will remain after the automation. Then add the cost of errors: complaints, corrected invoices, lost orders.

For a process that takes 30 hours a month at a full cost of €15 an hour, that is €450 a month. An automation costing €2,250 that removes 70% of that time pays for itself in under eight months, and that is before counting the errors. This is an example from a Polish company: where an hour of work costs more, the same automation pays for itself sooner.

If the payback period comes out longer than a year and a half, I usually advise against the implementation. Not because it can’t be done, but because the process will have changed by then anyway.

Where to start

The cheapest first step is a conversation in which we check whether the problem needs software at all. Surprisingly often it doesn’t, and then I say so plainly rather than sell you an implementation.

If you want to see the whole course of a project, its scope and how it is billed, I describe it on the automation and AI implementation page. If you only need a second opinion on an offer you already have, a consultation takes an hour and costs €75 net. That is usually enough to judge whether the quote is fair.