How Much Does AI Automation Cost a Small Business?

We were at an event once when a business owner told us how much he'd paid to have an automation built. I think he saw the look on our faces and wished the floor would swallow him up. It was a silly amount of money, and it didn't even work properly.

That's the problem with AI automation pricing. You can spend £10 a month or tens of thousands of pounds, and from the outside it's hard to tell what a fair price looks like. So here's an honest breakdown, from someone who builds these for a living.

The three things you pay for

Every automation has the same three costs:

1. The platform. The tool that runs your automation, like Make, Zapier or n8n.
2. The AI. Each time an AI model writes, reads or sorts something, it costs a small amount.
3. The setup. Either your time to learn and build it, or someone else's time that you pay for.

The first two are almost always cheaper than people expect. The third is where the money goes.

What it costs to do it yourself

The platform. Make is our tool of choice, and its Core plan is about $9 a month billed yearly, or around $10.59 monthly. That gets you 10,000 credits a month, which covers a lot of small business automations. There's also a free plan with 1,000 credits a month, so you can build your first automation before spending anything.

The AI. An AI call inside an automation usually costs around 10 cents or less. Some cheaper models cost a fraction of that. Unless you're processing thousands of things a day, your AI bill will be pocket change.

One thing that catches people out: your ChatGPT subscription doesn't include API access, which is what automations use. That's a separate account with its own bill. Lots of people also find out halfway through a build that they need to upgrade one of their other tools to get API access. Check before you start.

Your time. This is the real cost. Learning a platform like Make takes a week or two to get comfortable with, and your first proper automation might take an afternoon. Make's own free training will get you a long way. You don't need to be technical, but you do need to set aside the time.

What it costs to get help

If you'd rather someone else did it, here's what you'll typically see in the UK this year:

• Freelance AI consultants: roughly £600 to £1,200 a day for a generalist, more for a senior specialist
• A scoped project from a small consultancy: commonly £3,000 to £15,000, with first projects for businesses under 10 people often at the lower end
• Ongoing support: a monthly retainer, anywhere from around £1,000 upwards depending on how hands-on it is

You'll also see much bigger numbers quoted online, aimed at large companies. Ignore those. They're not for you.

Done-for-you usually means an upfront setup fee plus a monthly fee. That monthly fee should cover their time to keep things running, the platform costs and the AI usage. Always ask what's included.

Red flags to watch for

I've seen plenty of people with very little business experience selling simple automations for tens of thousands. A few things to watch for:

• Big price, simple job. If it's a form going into a CRM with an email drafted, it shouldn't cost a fortune. Scope drives cost.
• Tools you haven't agreed. A good consultant talks through every tool they're going to use before they use it, and shows you how your data is handled.
• No mention of payback. If nobody's worked out how long it takes to pay for itself, ask why.
• Locked in. You should own your accounts and your automations, not rent them from whoever built them.

Is it cheaper to automate or hire someone?

For repetitive admin, almost always automate. An automation doesn't take holidays, doesn't get bored copying data between systems and costs pennies to run.

But it's not really either/or. The best approach is to give the people you already have better tools. Let the automation do the heavy lifting and have one person checking the output, rather than hiring more people to do the copying and pasting.

What AI shouldn't replace is the human stuff: talking to customers, handling complaints, closing a sale, hiring decisions. Keep people on those.

How to work out if it's worth it

Here's a simple way to check. Take a job you do every week:

1. How many hours a week does it take?
2. Multiply by 48 working weeks to get hours a year.
3. Multiply by what your time is worth an hour.

Say your monthly reporting eats 3 hours a week. That's 144 hours a year. If your time's worth £30 an hour, that's £4,320 a year spent on one job.

Now compare that to the cost of automating it. If a build costs £1,500 and the platform is £15 a month, it's paid for itself in about four months. After that, it's saving you money every month.

My rule of thumb: if it takes two years to pay back, think hard about whether it's worth doing.

When it's not worth automating

I'll hold my hands up here. When I first got into automation I got a bit addicted. I spent hours building a complicated booking system for one or two bookings a week. I could have just done it myself. All those hours for not a great deal of return.

So don't automate something you do twice a month. Start with the jobs that are repetitive, annoying and add up over the week.

Are free AI tools good enough?

To start with, yes. Free plans on ChatGPT, Gemini and Make are enough to work out whether AI helps your business before you spend anything.

Once you're using AI for real business work, pay for the main plan of whichever AI you settle on. It's around $20 a month, you get more usage and better models, and business plans come with stronger protections for your data.

My advice

Start free. Pick one repetitive job, build it on Make's free plan and see what it saves you. Then work out the payback before you spend anything bigger, whether that's your time or someone else's.

And if you do get help, ask what's included, agree the tools up front and make sure the numbers add up.