Nobody publishes prices in this industry, which is exactly why you're reading this. So here are the honest ranges we see across the UK market, what pushes a project up or down within them, and how to work out whether any of it pays for itself.
The short answer: UK market ranges
- A single automated workflow (one process, one or two tools connected): £500 to £2,500 as a one-off build.
- A multi-system project (several workflows, a CRM at the centre, reporting): £2,500 to £10,000 depending on how many tools and edge cases are involved.
- Custom software (an internal tool or dashboard built from scratch): £5,000 to £30,000+. The range is wide because scope is everything.
- Ongoing consulting or an ops partner: £1,500 to £5,000+ per month, usually with a defined scope of systems being built and maintained.
- DIY with off-the-shelf tools (Zapier, Make, GHL and your own time): £50 to £300 a month in subscriptions, plus the hours you'll sink into building and unbreaking it.
We gate our own pricing behind a conversation, not because it's scary, but because quoting before understanding your operation is how projects go wrong. A discovery call gets you a real number for your situation.
What actually moves the price
Two businesses can ask for "automated client onboarding" and get quotes five times apart. The difference is rarely the automation itself. It's these:
- How many systems have to talk to each other. Connecting two modern tools with good APIs is quick. Connecting six tools, one of which is a spreadsheet someone updates on Fridays, is not.
- The state of your data. If contacts live in three places with three spellings, cleaning that up is part of the job.
- Edge cases. The happy path is 20% of the work. What happens when a payment fails, a form is half-filled, or a client books the wrong call type? Handling that properly is the other 80%.
- Who owns it afterwards. A build you can run yourself costs less over time than one you rent through a retainer. Ask every provider which one they're selling.
The ROI maths (do this before you buy anything)
Take one repetitive task. Estimate minutes per occurrence, times per month, and who does it. A weekly report that takes 90 minutes is 78 hours a year. At £50 an hour of founder time, that single report costs £3,900 a year to produce by hand.
Our client work keeps landing in the same zone: founders get ten or more hours a week back once the main manual processes are automated. One coaching business went from a 40-hour week to 20 while revenue grew. Price any quote against that number, not against the software subscription it replaces.
Red flags when you're comparing quotes
- A price before anyone has asked how your business actually runs.
- "We'll automate everything." You want the two or three processes that bleed the most time, done properly, first.
- No mention of what happens when something breaks at 9pm on a Friday.
- A stack of new subscriptions you didn't ask for. Good automation usually means fewer tools, not more.
Where to start
Start with an audit of where the hours are going, not with a shopping list of tools. That's true whether you work with us, someone else, or do it yourself. If you want the map done for you, that's what our automation service starts with, and the first conversation is free.
Founder, Anco AI. Builds the systems this site talks about, and runs his own business on them.