What automation really costs, and why one number is always wrong
The cost of an automation lives in four separate places, and three of them repeat. Two of my own builds bill in completely different shapes, which makes them a good way to show what to work out before you start.
“What will it cost?” is the first question in almost every enquiry. There is no honest single-number answer, and the reason is not reluctance to quote a price.
The number people usually quote covers the build. That is a one-off, and it is nearly always the smallest of the costs. The other three carry on afterwards, and they behave differently from one another.
Four costs, not one
One-off: the hours to build it. Paid once, visible immediately, agreed up front.
Fixed monthly: the subscriptions that cost the same whether you use the system or not. An n8n or Make plan, a phone number, a work mail account.
Usage-based: minutes of conversation, operations in a scenario, model tokens. This one depends on load and is unknown in advance.
Maintenance: the time it takes to keep the thing working six months from now. More on this below, because it is the one that gets left out.
Two builds, two different bills
I have two finished examples to hand, and they are useful precisely because they are opposites.
The first takes a request from a website form, cleans the fields, appends a row to Google Sheets and sends a Telegram alert. Five nodes in n8n. Sheets and Telegram are free, so the only paid piece is n8n itself, and it costs the same whether you take ten requests a month or a thousand. Almost all of the cost is the one-off plus a single flat plan.
The second is a voice receptionist on ElevenLabs. There are four separate meters: the conversational AI bills by the minute, the Twilio phone number charges both monthly and per minute, the Make scenarios count operations, and the calendar lives in a Microsoft 365 account. Two of the four grow with load.
The build is a one-off in both cases. Life after launch is not, and it is nothing alike.
The cost that grows when it works
Usage-based costs have an awkward property: they rise exactly when the thing succeeds.
A voice receptionist that takes twice as many calls costs twice as much. That is fine as long as a call is worth more than it costs. But you want to know that before launch, not from the first invoice.
So the figure worth working out is not the total budget but the cost of one event. What does one answered call cost. One processed request. One generated report. Multiply by your own volume and you have a real number — and you also learn straight away at what volume the system pays for itself and at what volume it does not.
With the lead workflow the cost per event falls as volume rises, since the plan is flat. With the voice receptionist it barely moves. Those are different business decisions and should not be conflated.
Maintenance is not about bugs
This is the part most often misunderstood.
Maintenance is not needed because the system was built badly. It is needed because everything around it moves. A provider updates an API. The model the agent ran on is retired. Someone renames a field on the website form. A column is inserted in the sheet and the writes shift along. A webhook address changes after a migration.
None of that broke inside the build. The ground moved underneath it.
The practical answer is undramatic: budget a few hours a quarter for upkeep. Not as insurance against poor work, but as the price of a world that does not hold still. A system left unmaintained does not stop one morning — it degrades quietly, first dropping one of three kinds of notification, then writing half its rows empty.
What to ask before you start
Three questions worth putting to any builder, me included.
Which subscriptions will this need, and which of them bill by usage. What does one event cost at my volume. What happens when a provider changes the rules, and who fixes it.
If there is no answer to the third, you are buying a build rather than a working system.
How I charge
By the hour. Not in packages — starter, business, premium — because a package always means part of it is paid for and unused, and part of what you need is outside it.
A first small task is a fixed price, so you can look at the result before discussing anything larger. Subscriptions are taken out in your name and paid directly to the providers; I do not resell them. That way you see the real bill and can take the system with you at any point.
The cost of your own case can be worked out before any work starts. Describe the task and I will break it down across these four and show you the cost per event.