Every automation quote raises the same question: is this a one-off amount or the start of a subscription that never stops. A fair question, because for an SME a surprise of a few thousand euros is no minor detail.
Below is how such a bill is built up in practice, including the items that usually go unmentioned in sales conversations.
Three kinds of costs, not one
If you only look at the build price, you are looking at about half the picture. There are three kinds of costs and they behave differently.
- Build costs. One-off. Figuring things out, setting up, integrating and testing. With us, per hour: €110 for straightforward work, €165 for complex development. A half-day core session (four hours) costs €596 excluding VAT and travel expenses.
- Usage costs. Monthly. Licences for packages you already have or add, hosting, and the consumption of the AI model itself. This scales with how much you use it.
- Maintenance costs. Ongoing, but irregular. Your supplier changes an integration, your process changes, someone finds an edge case. Count on maintenance every year, even if nothing breaks.
The items people forget
In almost every project something comes up that was not in the budget beforehand. Usually it is these four.
- Cleaning up your data. Duplicate customers, products spelled three different ways, addresses without a postcode. A system that has to work on this cannot get around it. This is often the largest unforeseen item.
- Hours from your own people. Someone has to explain how the work is done now, sit in on the test and check the results during the first weeks. Those are real hours, even though they appear on no invoice.
- Access to your own systems. Some packages charge separately for an integration or an extra user for the system. You only notice when you request it.
- The year after. An integration that works today does not automatically work after the next update of your package. Who fixes that and at what rate is something you would rather agree on in advance.
With every quote, including ours, ask what happens if you stop after a year. Can you take your data with you, does it keep running, and are you tied to a supplier. If someone is vague about that, you know enough.
Fixed price or per hour
Business owners often ask for a fixed price, and that is understandable. The problem is that a fixed price is only fair if exactly what will be built is settled in advance. With automation you rarely know that, because the exceptions only surface once you are inside the process. A supplier who names a fixed price without investigating has either built a hefty margin into it or will deliver less than you expected.
The workable middle ground is a fixed price for the investigation and an agreed maximum for the build, with checkpoints along the way where you can stop. Then you are never tied to an amount you did not see coming, and after the first step you can decide to leave it at that.
Returns you can measure in advance
Do not calculate with “time savings” in general terms. Choose one or two figures in advance that your business already tracks or can easily track, and measure them before the start. For example: how many days pass between a completed job and the invoice being sent. How many times a week a customer calls to ask where their order is. How many quotes go out the door per week. How many hours the admin team loses retyping supplier documents.
If you do not take that baseline measurement, the conversation afterwards becomes a matter of gut feeling. And gut feeling rarely wins against an invoice.
What disappoints about the payback period
Saved hours rarely become saved wage costs. If you save an employee five hours a week of retyping, you do not let that person go. The work shifts to things that were left undone. That is valuable, but it does not appear as a minus on your profit and loss statement. If you expect a direct cost saving, it almost always disappoints.
Where it can be measured in hard cash: work you are currently missing out on. Quotes that go out too late, invoices that sit for weeks, customers who walk away because they got no answer. Those are amounts you can substantiate with your own records, without anyone having to invent a percentage.
And sometimes the answer is simply that it does not pay. A process that happens twice a month and takes ten minutes does not pay back an integration of a few thousand euros. We would rather calculate that beforehand than explain it afterwards.
When you need us and when you do not
If your question can be answered with a subscription of twenty or thirty euros a month, do not hire an agency. Many businesses get their first gains from an AI assistant they already have and do not use, or from a feature in their existing package. That costs you an afternoon of looking into it and nothing more.
We are worth it as soon as integrations, custom-built work or multiple systems are involved, or if you want a substantiated answer to the question of whether something can pay off at all before you begin. In that last case, a core session is the cheapest way to find out that you should not do something.