"Automation" gets sold as everything from a Zapier trigger to an AI workforce, so pricing conversations start in a fog. Here's the honest map, with the numbers we actually quote and the ones we tell people not to pay. It's the same approach we took to what a small business website should cost: real ranges, and what moves you between them.
The three tiers of business automation
Tier 1 - Workflow automation: £500-£2,500
Connecting things you already use so humans stop copy-pasting between them. Lead lands in the website form, CRM record created, follow-up email fires, your phone pings. Invoice raised, payment chased on a schedule. Weekly numbers, one report in your inbox.
Built on tools like n8n, Make or native integrations, sitting on your existing systems. One to two weeks of work. This tier has the fastest payback of anything in this article - a follow-up automation that saves one lost enquiry a month has covered its build cost by spring.
Tier 2 - Custom CRMs, dashboards and internal apps: £2,000-£10,000+
This is where you stop renting software that half-fits and get a system shaped exactly to how your business runs: a CRM that mirrors your actual pipeline, a job tracker your team stops fighting, a client portal, a quoting engine with your real margins in it.
Four to eight weeks of build. The wide price range is scope: a focused single-purpose tool sits at the bottom, a multi-role system with permissions, client access and integrations sits at the top. (We run our own agency on one - the entire journey from enquiry to proposal to project delivery in a single system we built in weeks. It replaced five subscriptions and an ocean of spreadsheets.)
Tier 3 - AI assistants and bespoke platforms: £5,000-£25,000+
AI that qualifies leads, answers support questions, processes documents; platforms with customer-facing products on top. Real engineering, real testing, and only worth it once tiers 1 and 2 exist to feed it clean data. Anyone quoting you an "AI transformation" before your follow-up emails are automated is selling the roof before the walls.
Build vs. buy: the maths nobody shows you
Off-the-shelf looks cheaper because the price is monthly and the fit is invisible. Take a five-person team on a mainstream CRM at £40-£80 per seat: £2,400-£4,800 a year, forever, for software where you use a third of the features and fight the rest - plus the add-ons, plus the integration tool, plus the reporting tool. Over three years that's £8,000-£15,000 in rent.
A £6,000 custom build with £400/month support costs £20,400 over the same three years - more - but it fits exactly, scales without per-seat pricing, belongs to you, and typically absorbs two or three other subscriptions along the way. The crossover point is usually year two or three, sooner for bigger teams. Under roughly five users with simple needs, off-the-shelf wins; past that, the maths starts leaning custom. Anyone who tells you one answer fits every business is selling the answer they stock.
What automation actually saves
Cost it in hours, because that's where it hides. Ten hours a week of admin - chasing, re-typing, reporting, reminding - at even £15/hour is £7,800 a year. Twenty hours is £15,600, which is most of a part-time salary doing work nobody enjoys. Add the invisible line: enquiries that died because follow-up took four days, jobs that slipped because the tracker was a whiteboard.
The right first project attacks whichever of those numbers is biggest for you - which is why any decent agency starts by asking where your hours go, not by demoing software.
When not to automate
Honesty corner: automation multiplies whatever process it touches. If the process is broken, you get faster chaos. Don't automate a sales process that doesn't convert manually, don't build a CRM for a pipeline that changes shape monthly, and don't buy an AI assistant to answer questions your website should answer in plain text. Fix the process, then pour concrete on it.
FAQ
How much does a custom CRM cost in the UK?
£2,000-£10,000+ to build in 2026, plus £300-£1,000/month for support and iteration. Simple single-team CRMs sit at the lower end; multi-role systems with client portals and integrations at the top.
Is Zapier/Make enough, or do we need custom?
Glue tools are perfect for Tier 1 and we use them. You outgrow them when workflows need logic, permissions, a database and a UI - chains of 30 zaps held together with hope are a sign you needed Tier 2 a year ago.
Do we own the system after the build?
With us, yes - code, data and hosting are yours, documented, no lock-in. Ask this question of anyone you talk to, and walk away from "it lives on our platform" answers unless you like paying rent forever.
What's a realistic payback period?
Tier 1: weeks to months. Tier 2: 6-12 months against SaaS savings and recovered hours. If the proposal can't show the payback in that range with your numbers, the project is probably a want, not a need.
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