The honest answer is that a single workflow automation for a UK small or mid-sized business is usually a four-figure build, and the number is driven almost entirely by how many systems it touches and how many judgement calls a human currently makes inside it. Anyone quoting you before they have watched the task being done is guessing.
The more useful question is not what it costs, but what it is worth. That is arithmetic you can do yourself in about a minute.
Work out the ceiling before you ask for a price
Take the task you have in mind. Count how many times a week it happens, how many minutes it takes each time, and what an hour of the person doing it costs you fully loaded.
A task done twenty times a week, taking twelve minutes, at £24 an hour is four hours a week and just under £5,000 a year. That number is your ceiling. If a build costs less than a year of the problem, it is worth having. If it costs more, it needs to be a very good reason or a very long-lived system.
You can run this on the automation calculator without giving anyone your email address.
What actually moves the number
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How many systems it touches
Two systems with clean modern APIs is a straightforward job. Five systems, one of which is a 2011 database with no API, is a different piece of work entirely.
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How many decisions a human makes
Every judgement call inside the process is a rule that has to be captured, tested, and handled when it is ambiguous. Processes that look identical often differ enormously here.
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How messy the inputs are
Structured data arriving the same way every time is quick. Scanned PDFs from forty suppliers, each with a different layout, is the actual engineering.
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Volume and the cost of a mistake
A task run four hundred times a month justifies more careful work than one run twice. So does a task where a wrong answer reaches a customer.
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What happens when it fails
A queue for a human to check is cheap and usually right. A system that must never stop costs considerably more, and we will tell you when you do not need one.
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Whether anyone will own it
Documentation, monitoring and alerting are not optional extras. An automation nobody is watching fails quietly and the business goes back to doing the work by hand while still paying for the software.
The running cost is not zero
Model calls, hosting, monitoring and roughly an hour a month of someone checking the report. For most of the systems we run this is a small monthly figure rather than a large one, but it is real and it should appear in the quote you are given. If a proposal shows a build cost and nothing else, ask what year two looks like. See what an automation costs to run for a year.
What you should refuse to pay for
Day rates reward the slowest possible delivery. Open-ended discovery bills you for the supplier learning your business. A charge for the proposal itself means you are paying to be sold to. None of these are normal costs of getting a system built, whoever you use.
Our own approach is on how we quote: a fixed-fee pilot that covers the scope and the build of the first automation, then fixed quotes for anything after it.
Questions we get asked
Can you give me a price without seeing the task?
Not honestly. The same task in two businesses can differ by a factor of three depending on how many systems it touches and how clean the inputs are. Anyone giving you a firm number before watching the work is quoting a different job to the one you have.
Is there a minimum worth doing?
Roughly, if a task costs you less than about two thousand pounds a year in time, automating it rarely pays back quickly enough to be worth the effort. Bundle it with something bigger or leave it alone.
Do costs come down if we automate more than one thing?
Usually yes, because the second and third automations reuse the same integrations, monitoring and hosting. The expensive part is connecting to a system for the first time.
What if the quote turns out to be wrong?
That should be the supplier problem, not yours. A fixed quote that drifts halfway through was not a fixed quote. The only thing that should change the number is you asking for something that was not in the scope document.