Everything on this page is either a published figure with a link, read on 21 September 2026, or our own price. Nothing here is an estimate for your work, because nobody can produce one of those from a web page.
At a glance
- £500 to £40,000 and above covers the published UK market, with most first projects between £5,000 and £15,000.
- Our price is fixed and public: free fit call, £2,000 fourteen-day audit, then a scoped build price. The audit fee is not credited against a build.
- Four running costs arrive after go-live and are missing from most quotes.
- A no-code platform at £20 to £50 a month beats a build more often than suppliers of builds admit.
- The usual first targets are month-end close, supplier invoices and new-starter onboarding: high volume, rules-based and easy to measure.
What is business process automation?
Business process automation is the practice of handing a repeating sequence of work to software, end to end, so that the people who used to do it are only involved in the exceptions. The important words are “repeating” and “end to end”. A tool that helps with one step is useful. Automation is when the hand-offs between steps stop needing a person.
In a business of £1m to £50m turnover it usually looks unglamorous. An order acknowledgement read and filed. A purchase invoice matched to a delivery note. A new starter moving from signed offer to accounts set up and induction booked without anyone retyping their details. The value is not in any single instance; it is in the fact that it happens the same way four hundred times a month.
That is also why the cost question is answerable. Frequency multiplied by duration gives you the value, and the value tells you which band you are allowed to spend in.
The bands and what each one buys
Four bands cover almost everything a mid-sized UK business commissions. The figures below are published by other suppliers on their own pages and are linked in full at the bottom; treat them as the market’s shape rather than as a quote.
| Band | Published UK range | What it typically buys | Typical duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| One workflow, no-code | £500 to £2,000 | A form or event routed between two systems with a notification | Days to two weeks |
| One workflow, built and supported | £1,500 to £5,000 | A single high-volume process with error handling and a fallback | Four to six weeks |
| A department, three to five workflows | £5,000 to £15,000 | A connected set covering one team’s week, with reporting | Two to four months |
| A programme across the business | £15,000 to £40,000 and above | Several teams, shared data, permissions, monitoring | Four months upwards |
Softomate publishes £1,500 for a single workflow rising to £40,000 and above for a full programme, and says most UK small and mid-sized firms budget £5,000 to £15,000 for their first meaningful project. AI Workforce publishes £500 to £2,000 for a simple workflow and £3,000 to £10,000 for a mid-range build. SoftBlues describes the wider integration market at £15,000 to £750,000 and above, with most smaller firms budgeting £5,000 to £30,000 for a first automation.
The bands agree more than they disagree, which is worth something. Where they differ is at the bottom, and the difference is whether “automation” means a no-code connector or a supported system that someone will fix at eight on a Monday morning.
What do we charge?
The 30-minute fit call is free and nothing is purchased on it. The AI Constraint Audit is a fixed £2,000 over fourteen days, including three sixty-minute working sessions with the founders who would scope any build. It ends in four documents you own: a constraint map, an AI opportunity map, economic cases and a ranked next step.
A build is quoted as a fixed price after that, scoped to what the audit found. We do not publish a build band on this page, because a band published without your process behind it is a guess and you would be right to distrust it. What we do publish is everything else, including exactly what the work covers, on the business process automation page.
The audit fee is not credited against a build. If it were, we would earn more by recommending a build than by recommending you buy a £40 a month tool, and you should discount any recommendation made under that incentive.
One observation from reading the competition, offered because it is checkable: not one of the five UK automation pages we studied publishes its own price. Every band on them is commentary about the market. The closest any comes is SoftBlues, which describes how it prices and still does not say what it charges.
What moves the number?
Four things, in order of how much they move it.
How many systems the workflow touches. Two is a connector. Five is a project. Each integration is a dependency you do not control and needs error handling for the day the other end changes without telling you.
The state of your data. If the information lives in one reasonably clean place, that is a morning. If it lives across a shared inbox, three spreadsheets with different column names and one person’s memory, the data work is the project.
How many decisions the software has to make. Moving information is cheap. Deciding something is not. Each rule is a branch to specify, build and test, and ten rules cost more than ten times one rule because they interact.
What it costs when the output is wrong. A tool that suggests an order of work can be wrong occasionally. A tool that releases a supplier payment or sends a customer a priced proposal cannot, and the difference is validation, an audit trail, and a person in the loop.
What does a single workflow cost?
At the bottom of the market, £500 to £2,000 buys a connection between two systems on a no-code platform, usually within days. That is a real and often correct answer, and any supplier who refuses to mention it is protecting their own margin.
Between £1,500 and £5,000 you are paying for the parts a connector does not have: what happens when the input is malformed, what happens when the other system is unavailable, who gets told, and what the audit trail looks like afterwards. Published durations for this band are four to six weeks.
Above that, a single workflow only costs more for one of two reasons. Either it is not really one workflow, or the data underneath it needs work first. Both are worth finding out before you sign rather than after.
What does a programme cost, and why is the second workflow cheaper?
A programme is the department and business bands above: £5,000 to £15,000 for a connected set covering one team, and £15,000 to £40,000 and above where several teams share data and permissions.
The second workflow is cheaper than the first because the expensive parts are shared. Access to your systems is already established, the data model already exists, the monitoring is already running, and the people know how the process of building works. Softomate puts additional workflows in a multi-workflow programme at £1,500 to £4,000 each, and adds a caution we would repeat: the per-workflow cost does not fall as sharply as clients expect.
It does not fall further because the new parts are the ones that were always going to be specific: the rules, the exceptions, and the people whose job changes.
Do you need a business process automation platform?
Business process automation software is a platform you rent, and for a process with few exceptions it is often the right answer. No-code platforms start at around £20 to £50 a month for small use, so a custom build only wins once the rules, the seat count or your dependence on the process outgrow the licence.
A platform provides the connectors, the monitoring and the interface. General work platforms are seat-priced: Monday.com publishes its Basic tier at £8 per seat per month billed annually, which is £80 a month for ten seats. Those are cheap compared with any build, and for a process with few exceptions they are frequently the right answer.
A platform stops being the right answer at three points. When per-seat pricing means you are paying for people who only need to see an output. When the rules you need cannot be expressed in the platform’s own language, so you end up writing code inside somebody else’s product. And when the automation becomes load bearing, at which point renting the thing your business depends on is a commercial risk rather than a saving.
The test is to price three years of seats against one build, using the vendor’s own published list price rather than a remembered figure.
What AI business process automation adds, and what it costs
The term usually means one of three things, and they have different prices.
Reading unstructured input. Documents, emails and forms turned into fields. This is where most of the value in a mid-sized business sits, because it removes the retyping rather than the thinking. Costs sit inside the bands above, plus usage.
Classifying or routing. Deciding which queue something belongs in. Cheap to build, and the place where a wrong answer is cheapest, which is why it is a sensible first project.
Drafting or deciding. Producing a reply, a quote or a recommendation. The most valuable and the most expensive, because correctness work dominates. If the output reaches a customer or affects a person, the ICO’s guidance on AI and data protection applies, and that belongs in the plan rather than in a late conversation with your lawyer.
Side by side
What “AI” adds to automation, and what each part costs
The term means one of three things, with three different prices and three different costs of being wrong.
| ReadingDocuments and emails into fields | ClassifyingWhich queue it belongs in | Drafting or decidingA reply or a recommendation | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it looks like | FieldRead from the PDF SupplierHarlow Packaging Total£12,400 Flagged: Due date31/10 or 10/31: a person checks | EmailQueue Matched: Where is my order?Orders Matched: Invoice queryAccounts Flagged: Complaint plus refundNo queue fits | We can refund £340 under the 14-day returns policy. Policy check: this order is 19 days old A person decides before anything sends. |
| What it removes | The retyping, not the thinking | The sorting | The first draft of a decision |
| Cost of a wrong answer | Mixed: A field to correct | In its favour: The cheapest place to be wrong | Against it: Highest: it can reach a customer |
| What drives the price | Usage, inside the usual bands | Cheap to build | Correctness work dominates |
| Watch for | Unit cost per document | Exceptions that fit no queue | ICO guidance, planned in early |
| The verdict | Where most of the value sits | A sensible first project | Most valuable, most expensive |
in its favour mixed against it
The cost difference against conventional automation is mostly usage rather than build: model calls scale with volume. A pilot on 200 documents a month tells you very little about a live system on 20,000, so ask for the unit cost per item, not the monthly figure.
The costs that appear after go-live
Four of them, and none is a surprise if it is written down at the start.
Platform and licence fees, which recur whether or not the automation is busy. Usage, which does not: model and API spend scales with volume. Hosting, which published UK guides put at £200 to £2,000 a month depending on scale. And support and monitoring: Square Root puts ongoing maintenance and support at 15 to 25 per cent of build cost annually, and published UK retainers start around £200 a month.
The one that costs real money is the silent failure. An automation that stops with an error is a bad morning. An automation that processes nothing for two weeks without raising an error is a month-end problem, and monitoring is the only thing that distinguishes them.
Fixed price or day rate: who carries the risk?
A day rate tells you what an hour costs. It does not tell you how many hours the job takes, which is the entire question. Two suppliers on the same rate can differ several times over on the same brief, because one has built it before, and experience shows up as fewer days rather than a lower rate.
A fixed price moves the estimating risk to the party better placed to carry it, which is the supplier. That only works if the scope is real, which is why we insist on the audit first and why any fixed price offered from a paragraph of description should worry you.
Time and materials is defensible in exactly one situation: genuine research, where nobody can know the shape in advance. If your work is not research, ask why the supplier needs you to carry the risk.
What does a fair quote look like?
It names the systems. It separates build from run rate. It states what is not included. It says who owns the code and the data. And it describes what happens when the output is wrong, in a sentence that is not “we will test it thoroughly”.
Five things should stop you signing. A single-line total with no breakdown. No mention of data preparation. No run-rate line. A discovery phase billed separately after a fixed price has already been quoted. And a change-request clause broad enough to cover work you thought was in the original scope.
What we run ourselves, and what it shows
Every automation supplier on this search publishes bands. Here is what we run instead.
Our own business runs on the same kind of automation: an autoposter that publishes our content and keeps the platform’s receipt for each post, outreach engines, and a knowledge base of 4,535 notes, 5.9 million words and 1,023 skills, which is one of several we operate. The systems are drawn on our evidence page, with what we cannot show you yet stated plainly.
For a view of the whole business rather than one workflow, the Inside AGMM page draws every system we run, department by department, and says plainly what we cannot show you yet. The claim that supports is narrow and we keep it narrow: we can build automation that runs every day to an auditable standard. It does not prove hours saved for anybody else.
When automation is not worth it
When the process runs rarely. Frequency, not irritation, decides this.
When the exceptions outnumber the routine cases. If more than a third of jobs take the unusual path, there is no usual path to automate.
When the process is about to change. You would be paying to set concrete around something still moving.
When nobody owns it. Software makes a defined process faster. It does not create the definition, and an unowned process drifts back to the old way within a month.
And when the arithmetic says no. Put a loaded hourly cost against the hours the process really consumes. If the annual total is comfortably under the cost of measuring it properly, keep your money.
What this does not apply to
This page is written for UK businesses turning over roughly £1m to £50m: an operations director at a 40-person distributor, a head of people at a services firm, a finance lead at a clinic group. It assumes the process repeats and somebody can be taken off the floor to describe it.
It does not apply to sole traders or very small teams, where a subscription tool is nearly always right. It does not cover industrial or physical process automation, which is a different discipline with different suppliers. It does not cover public-sector procurement. And the competitor bands quoted are those suppliers’ published market commentary, not audited figures and not quotes for your work.
When we are the wrong choice
If a £40 a month tool does the job, buy the tool. We will say so on the free call and you will not owe us anything.
If you want a build quoted from a one-paragraph brief, we are the wrong supplier, and you should be wary of the ones who will.
If the real problem is that two departments disagree about who owns the work, that is a management decision and software will not settle it.
If you need it live next week, fourteen days of audit first is the wrong shape and we will tell you that rather than start.
Sources
Read on 21 September 2026.
- Softomate Solutions, business automation cost UK. £1,500 for a single workflow to £40,000 and above for a programme; most UK firms budget £5,000 to £15,000 for a first project; single workflow £1,500 to £5,000 over four to six weeks; additional workflows £1,500 to £4,000 each.
- AI Workforce, AI automation pricing UK. Simple workflow £500 to £2,000; mid-range build £3,000 to £10,000; monthly support £200 to £800; no-code platforms £20 to £50 a month.
- SoftBlues, AI automation pricing UK 2026. £15,000 to £750,000 and above; £5,000 to £30,000 for a first automation; the page describing its own pricing method without naming its price.
- Square Root, cost to develop software in the UK. Ongoing maintenance and support 15 to 25 per cent annually; cloud infrastructure £200 to £2,000 a month.
- Monday.com pricing. Basic tier £8 per seat per month billed annually, shown as £80 a month for ten seats.
- ICO, artificial intelligence guidance.
- Our own operating systems are described on our evidence page. They are our own systems, not market commentary.
- Our own prices and what the work covers are published on business process automation. They are our figures, not market commentary.
Related reading
- Audit the process before you automate it
- How much does AI implementation cost in the UK?
- Custom software or off-the-shelf: how to decide
Pick the relevant department for your first automation, then start with the AI Constraint Audit: £2,000 over 14 days. It finds the constraints, weak points and opportunities to save or earn serious money, and a more extensive audit always follows and is included in the proposal.
Not one competitor page we read publishes its own price. Every band on those pages is commentary about somebody else's work.
Frequently asked questions
What is business process automation?
Business process automation is the practice of handing a repeating sequence of work to software, end to end, so that the people who used to do it are only involved in the exceptions. The important words are "repeating" and "end to end". A tool that helps with one step is useful. Automation is when the hand-offs between steps stop needing a person.
What does business process automation cost in the UK?
Four bands cover almost everything a mid-sized UK business commissions. The figures below are published by other suppliers on their own pages and are linked in full at the bottom; treat them as the market's shape rather than as a quote.
What does it cost to automate a single workflow?
At the bottom of the market, £500 to £2,000 buys a connection between two systems on a no-code platform, usually within days. That is a real and often correct answer, and any supplier who refuses to mention it is protecting their own margin.
Do you need a business process automation platform?
Business process automation software is a platform you rent, and for a process with few exceptions it is often the right answer. No-code platforms start at around £20 to £50 a month for small use, so a custom build only wins once the rules, the seat count or your dependence on the process outgrow the licence.
What are the ongoing costs after an automation goes live?
Four of them, and none is a surprise if it is written down at the start.
When is business process automation not worth doing?
When the process runs rarely. Frequency, not irritation, decides this.
How much does it cost to automate one process in the UK?
Published bands put a single workflow at £500 to £2,000 on a no-code platform and £1,500 to £5,000 for a supported build, typically over four to six weeks. Those are market figures, not quotes. What moves them most is how many systems the workflow has to touch.
What does AGMM charge for business process automation?
A free 30-minute fit call, then a fixed £2,000 AI Constraint Audit over fourteen days, then a fixed build price scoped from what the audit found. We do not quote a build from a description, because a number produced before anyone has read the process is a guess.
Why do two quotes for the same workflow differ by five times?
Because one is pricing the happy path and the other is pricing the exceptions. Ask both suppliers what happens when the input arrives in the wrong format, when the other system is down, and when the output is wrong. The gap between the two answers is usually the gap between the two prices.
What are the monthly costs after it is built?
Platform or licence fees, model and API usage, hosting, and monitoring. No-code platform subscriptions commonly run £20 to £50 a month for small use, and published UK support retainers run from £200 a month upwards. Usage-based costs scale with volume rather than headcount, which is the one people under-budget.
Is a retainer necessary, or can we maintain it ourselves?
You can maintain it yourselves if you own the code and somebody internally can read it. The thing a retainer really buys is monitoring, because the expensive failure is not an automation that breaks loudly, it is one that stops without an error and nobody notices for a fortnight.
What happens to the automation if we change our CRM?
The part that touches the CRM has to be rewritten, and the rest usually survives. This is worth asking about before you build, because a system designed around one vendor's interface is more expensive to move than one designed around your own data.
How quickly does an automation pay for itself?
It depends entirely on frequency. A ten-minute task done twenty times a day is worth more than 800 hours a year. The same task done twice a month is worth four hours a year and will never pay back a build. Measure frequency and duration before anyone quotes.
Do I need business process automation software or a custom build?
Often software. No-code platforms start at around £20 to £50 a month for small use and suit a process with few exceptions. A build wins when per-seat pricing, rules the platform cannot express, or your dependence on the process outgrow the licence. Price three years of seats against one build, using the vendor's own list price.
Can you automate a process if we do not know what it costs us today?
We can, but we will not recommend it. Without a baseline there is no way to tell afterwards whether it worked, and the project becomes a matter of opinion. Measuring the current cost is the first fortnight's work and it is the cheapest part of the whole exercise.
- Answers question 01
- Answers question 02
- Answers question 03
- Answers question 04
- Answers question 05
- Answers question 06