Affordable AI automation from $4,000, live in three weeks.
One workflow, mapped in week one and running in your own stack by week three. This page is the honest version: what the low cost tier covers, what it leaves out, and the point at which you should stop buying cheap.
What $4,000 of AI automation actually buys
Four thousand dollars buys one workflow, taken from wherever it starts today to running without a person in the middle. Not a proof of concept, not a recorded demo, not a document describing what could be built later. A workflow that fires on a trigger, does the work, writes its own log, and tells a named human when it cannot finish.
The scope is deliberately narrow. A workflow here means something shaped like invoice matching, lead qualification, order exceptions or support triage: one repeating process, three to eight steps, two or three systems, one person who can answer questions about the rules. Coastline Logistics had fourteen steps across three teams, and that was a six-week engagement. The budget tier is its smaller sibling.
We publish the floor because the alternative is a discovery call whose real purpose is finding out what you can afford.
What you get at this price
- A week-one audit: the process mapped step by step, with the time each step costs today
- One workflow on n8n, Make, Zapier or plain code, chosen for your team rather than our licence
- Error handling, retries and idempotency, so a failure stops and alerts instead of double-running
- A timestamped run log you can read without asking us anything
- Exceptions routed to a named person in Slack or email, context already attached
- A written handover: how it works, how to change it, how to switch it off
- Thirty days of support after go-live on anything we built
- Full ownership. It runs in your accounts, on your credentials, under your billing
The person who writes the audit is the person who builds the workflow. Two people work a job this size — an automation engineer and a delivery lead who reviews — and you talk to both. You see it running in your own stack in week two, not a slide describing it.
The number that matters at handover comes from your timesheets. In week one we record what the process costs in hours; at handover we measure it again. If the gap is not worth the fee, we would both rather learn that in week one.
What you do not get at this price
This is the part most cheap AI automation pages leave out, so here it is plainly. At $4,000 you are buying a small, well-built thing, and everything a larger budget buys is genuinely absent.
- No 24/7 support and no uptime SLA. Business hours, one time zone, best effort.
- No bespoke model training or fine-tuning on your data. Hosted models, prompts, retrieval and evaluation only.
- No unlimited revisions. Scope freezes after the audit and you get two rounds of changes inside it.
- No dedicated account manager. You get the engineer, who is faster and also takes holidays.
- No second, third or fourth workflow. One means one.
- No compliance programme. We work inside your existing controls; we do not build them for you here.
- No reporting dashboard. You get run logs and alerts, not a product.
None of that is a trap or a corridor built to walk you into a larger invoice. It is the reason the number is $4,000 and not $20,000. Fine-tuning on your own corpus is real work that starts around $25,000, and it is almost never the right first purchase. An on-call rota costs what it costs to wake people up.
If a line above is a requirement rather than a preference, say so on the scoping call. We will quote the tier that covers it, or tell you we are the wrong firm.
Each additional workflow is scoped from $2,500 once the first is live and the connections already exist.
What the alternatives cost
Ranges are the market rates we quote against in 2026, not published prices from those firms. The Coastline figure is from their own timesheets across 90 days.
The comparison most teams actually make is the first row against the last, and the arithmetic is unglamorous. Ten hours a week returned is worth roughly $350 a week at a $35 fully loaded rate, so a $4,000 build passes payback in about eleven weeks. Below four hours a week, automating is probably not worth it, and we will say so rather than sell it.
How we keep it this price
There is no trick, which matters because in this market cheap usually means somebody junior is learning on your process. Five things carry the number.
Two senior people, no pyramid. An engineer builds, a delivery lead reviews. Nobody bills you to supervise a junior, or to write the status report the supervisor reads.
No account management layer. You talk to the person writing the workflow. Agencies at three times this price spend a real share of the fee on the people sitting between you and the build.
Fixed scope after the audit week. Change requests are where small automation projects die: each costs a call, a re-estimate and an invoice line. We do the arguing once, then build what was agreed.
Reused internal tooling. Ten years and 120-odd projects gave us a connector library, retry and idempotency patterns, logging conventions. You are not paying us to write retry logic for the fourth time this year. What is bespoke is the shape of your process and the rules inside it.
Your licences, not ours. We do not resell a platform or take a margin on your plan. If a $20 a month tool does the job, we say so and put it in your name.
What breaks a cheap automation
- An API changes and nobody notices, because nobody reads the log
- The process changes and nobody tells the workflow
- The exception queue has no owner, so exceptions become a second backlog
All three are ownership problems rather than engineering ones. The handover names a person for each, which is the cheapest failure prevention available.
AI automation pricing above the floor
That is our AI automation pricing in full, and every tier is fixed after the audit week rather than billed hourly. The step from a workflow tool to a custom pipeline is the one worth understanding: it is not about complexity, it is about whether you need volume, audit trails and error budgets a visual builder cannot give you.
When you should spend more than this
The budget tier is the wrong purchase more often than a page like this usually admits. Six situations where we quote higher, or tell you to spend nothing yet.
The process is broken, not slow
Automating a bad process makes the bad outcome arrive faster. If nobody can state the rules without a meeting, buy the audit alone, fix the process, come back.
Money moves and cannot be undone
Payments, refunds, payroll. These need approval gates, reconciliation and someone reachable at midnight. That is a monitored tier, not a $4,000 one.
The data is regulated
Health records, card data, personal data crossing borders. The controls and the evidence trail cost more than the automation, and they are not optional.
Volume or latency is real
If it must answer inside a second, or run a hundred thousand times a day, a workflow tool is the wrong substrate. That is a custom pipeline from $18,000.
The judgement is hard, not repetitive
Where accuracy carries risk you need an evaluation suite, not a good prompt. The 1,200-claim harness behind the Nordwind workbench is why adjusters trusted it.
Three departments have to agree
When the blocker is consensus rather than engineering, a cheap build stalls in review and the fee buys nothing. Spend on getting the decision made first.
A seventh case: some steps are manual because that is where a person notices something is wrong. Automate the assembly, leave the noticing.
Three weeks, week by week
Scoping call
Thirty minutes. You leave with a yes, a no, or a not at this price.
Audit and fixed quote
The process mapped, the hours counted, the scope frozen in writing.
Build in your stack
Built on your accounts, demoed live. You run it yourself before we finish.
Handover
Documentation, a walkthrough, 30 days of support. You own all of it.
Who the low cost tier is right for
It fits teams of five to two hundred people with one process that runs at least weekly and an owner who can state the rules in a sentence. It fits badly where the process changes every month, where the systems have no interface but a screen, or where the real requirement is a person who can be asked questions. Nothing at any price fixes the last one.
- The process runs at least weekly and follows rules someone can state
- Two or three systems, each with an API or a reliable export
- One owner who can decide what happens to an exception
- You want it in your accounts, under your billing, from day one
- You would rather have a small thing that works than a roadmap
Automation we have shipped
These were larger engagements than the floor tier. They show the shape of the work and how results get measured, which does not change with the invoice.
Questions about cheap AI automation
It can be. Consultancies price automation as a programme — discovery, a platform licence, change management — and that starts around $60,000. One workflow needs none of it. Our floor is $4,000, built and handed over in three weeks, and ten hours a week returned pays that back in about eleven weeks at a $35 fully loaded rate.
Building it yourself on Zapier or Make. Plan fees run $20 to $200 a month, and for three steps with no exceptions that is the right answer — we will say so on the call. It stops being cheapest once the edge cases arrive: retries, duplicate runs, and who gets told when it breaks at 2am.
Usually $20 to $150 a month, paid by you to the vendors: the workflow tool plan plus model usage. A small workflow spends $8 to $40 on model calls. We charge no licence and no platform fee; an optional support retainer starts at $600 a month.
Not from us, and be careful who says yes. Under $1,000 buys a few hours: two apps connected, no error handling, no logging, no named owner. It usually works for a month. We would rather sell you the audit alone than take $900 for something that fails quietly.
Real, but deliberately small. It runs on a trigger in your own accounts, retries on failure, logs every run, and routes exceptions to a named person with context attached. What it is not is a programme: one workflow, two or three systems, scope fixed after the audit.
For a repeating, rule-based process, almost always. A fully loaded ops coordinator costs $48,000 to $68,000 a year and still does the steps by hand. At Coastline Logistics the order flow gave back 698 hours a month, measured from their own timesheets over 90 days.
Yes, and the plan goes in your name. Which tool we use is decided in the audit week by what your team can maintain, not by what we resell. Self-hosted n8n costs a small server; Make and Zapier land between $20 and $200 a month.
Thirty days of support are included, and anything we built that fails in that window is fixed at no cost. After that: fix it yourself from the handover document, buy hours as needed, or take the retainer from $600 a month.
The audit is the first week of the $4,000, and it is the one part we sell on its own. If the map shows the process is not ready, you keep the map and we stop there.
Yes. Inheriting a half-finished Zapier account is common. The audit covers what runs, what is silently broken and what is worth keeping. Rebuilding on a working foundation is usually cheaper than starting again.
Want the $4,000 version scoped?
Send the process and we will tell you on the call whether it fits the floor tier, needs a bigger number, or should not be automated at all. Reply within one business day.