Writing
Pricing
5 min read
By James Sheriff
How much does AI automation cost a small business in the UK?
Most of the cost is a one-off build. The running costs are smaller than people expect. And the only number that really matters is how many hours it gives back.
Contents
The short answer
For a small UK business, automating one process usually breaks down into three costs:
| Stage | What it is | UK market range | My price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audit | Finding what’s worth automating | £750 to £2,500 | £950 |
| Build | Automating one process end to end | £3,000 to £25,000 | From £3,500 |
| Running | Hosting, monitoring, changes | Hundreds to low thousands a month | From £350 a month |
On top of that you pay the AI provider for usage, which for most small businesses is small. More on that below.
Where the market ranges come from
These aren’t my numbers. They’re from people who publish their pricing research:
- Audit: one UK consultant’s guide puts a proper audit with a written report at £750 to £2,500 for a business under ten staff, usually one to three days of work.
- Build: the same consultant says a business with under ten staff is realistically looking at £3,000 to £8,000 for a first serious piece of work: an audit plus one implementation. Another UK guide puts AI wired into your systems for one process at £5,000 to £25,000.
- Running: London agencies typically charge £500 to £2,500 a month to manage automations, depending on how much changes and how closely they watch it.
The spread is wide because the work is. Automating one tidy process that touches two systems is a different job from rewiring a whole department.
What you’re actually paying for
The audit
An audit answers one question: where does your team’s time go, and which of those jobs could a system do? You should come away with a written list of what’s worth automating, what isn’t, and what each build would cost.
If someone offers to skip straight to building, ask how they know what to build. I’ve written more about what an audit covers.
The build
This is the bulk of the cost. It covers connecting your existing tools, writing the logic, deciding what happens when something unexpected arrives, and testing it on real examples before it goes live.
A fixed price is worth insisting on. It puts the risk of overrunning on the person who quoted, not on you.
Running costs
An automation sits on top of other software, and other software changes. Someone has to notice when an email format changes or a supplier updates their system. That’s what a monthly fee pays for: hosting, monitoring, fixing things when they break, and small changes as your business changes.
You can skip this and look after it yourself, or have your own developer do it. Just budget for someone doing it.
AI usage fees
If the automation uses a commercial AI model, the provider charges per use. One UK agency puts the realistic range for a small business running a few automations at £5 to £100 a month. Some jobs don’t need a commercial model at all and can run on servers you control, which changes the cost again.
That range is for light use. At high volume it’s more. For a real example: the order system I run for a UK manufacturer reads around 7,000 emails a month, many with PDFs, spreadsheets or photographed forms attached. In the 30 days to 7 September, every AI read it made cost about $425 in total. Two things keep that down: typed documents go to a cheaper, faster model, and only photos and scans go to the stronger one. Ask anyone quoting you how they’ll do the same.
How to work out if it pays
Ignore the AI hype and do the sum. You need three numbers:
- Hours per month the job takes now.
- Cost per hour of the person doing it, including employer costs.
- Total cost of the automation over a year: build plus twelve months of running.
If hours × cost per hour × 12 is comfortably bigger than the yearly total, it’s worth looking at.
Here’s a worked example with made-up figures, so you can see the shape of it:
Example only: a job takes 40 hours a month. The person doing it costs £18 an hour. That’s £720 a month, or £8,640 a year. A £3,500 build plus £350 a month running comes to £7,700 in the first year, and £4,200 a year after that.
That example pays for itself in the first year, just. The second year is where it earns its keep. If the job only took 10 hours a month, it wouldn’t be worth automating on time alone.
For a real one: that same order system read, sorted and prioritised 7,369 emails in the last 30 days. At an estimated five minutes each by hand, that’s roughly 614 hours of reading and sorting in a month, against an AI bill in the hundreds. At that volume the sum isn’t close. The case study has the details.
When it isn’t worth it
Some jobs don’t pay back, however clever the technology:
- Rare jobs. A task you do once a month rarely repays a build.
- Broken processes. Automating a muddle gives you a faster muddle. Fix the process first.
- Judgement calls. If the value of the job is someone’s experience, a system can prepare the information, but a person should still decide.
Which jobs are worth automating goes into this in more detail.
Questions to ask anyone quoting you
- Is the price fixed, and what would trigger a change?
- What’s included in the monthly fee, and what costs extra?
- Who pays the AI usage fees, and roughly how much will they be at my volume?
- Who owns the code and the accounts when it’s finished?
- What happens if you stop working with me?
If the answers are vague, the bill probably will be too.