How much does it cost to automate a business?
Put directly: automation has two costs, not one.
- Implementation — paid once, to build the automation. It varies with how complex the process is, how many systems are involved, and the volume of data.
- Hosting and support — paid on a recurring basis (usually annually), to keep the automation running 24 hours a day and fix things when a connected system changes.
Companies hearing about automation for the first time often expect a single "pay and forget" price. That doesn't exist. An automation needs somewhere to run and someone monitoring whether it's still working — just like an employee needs a desk and someone who notices if they didn't show up for work.
The math most companies never run
Every process a person executes has a cost per hour, even if no one stops to calculate it.
If an employee costs R$5,000/month (with benefits) and works 40h/week, their cost works out to around R$31 per hour. If they cost R$10,000/month, that rises to roughly R$62 per hour.
Now compare that to automation: the monthly cost of keeping an automation running usually falls between R$200 and R$2,000, depending on the process and volume of runs. Since it runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the cost per hour lands between R$0.30 and R$3.
This isn't a comparison about replacing people — it's about where it's worth spending the hour of someone who costs R$31 or R$62. Copying data from one system to another isn't one of those tasks.
What drives the price of an automation
- Process complexity. How many steps, how many decisions along the way, how many different "if this, then that" branches.
- Number of systems involved. Connecting two systems is simpler than orchestrating five.
- Volume and frequency. A process that runs 10 times a day has different robustness requirements than one that runs 10,000 times a day.
- Criticality. If the process is critical by impact (the company loses money if it stops), the level of monitoring and redundancy needs to be higher — and that costs more.
- Whether the process is already well defined. Automating a messy process requires organizing it first. That's a separate step (and cost) from the automation itself.
The hidden cost of not automating
The question "how much does automating cost" only makes sense next to the opposite question: how much does staying unautomated cost.
A few examples of invisible cost:
- Hours of people who cost R$31–62/hour spent copying and pasting data between spreadsheets and systems.
- Typos that cause rework, wrong billing, or mismatched information between departments.
- A lead or customer lost because the reply took hours instead of minutes.
- A contract or payment that expires unnoticed, because the alert depended on someone remembering manually.
That cost never shows up as a line item in any budget, but it's being paid every month — just in lost productivity, not in an invoice with a visible number.
Automation vs. process consultancy: why sometimes the first step isn't automation
A common mistake is trying to automate a process that isn't well defined yet. Automating a mess doesn't fix the mess — it just makes it happen faster, with fewer people noticing it exists.
That's why, before pricing an automation, the first step is understanding whether the process already has clear steps, defined owners, and a single source of truth for each piece of information. If it doesn't, the initial investment goes into organizing the process — and only then automating it. Skipping that step costs more in the end, because the automation will need to be rebuilt when the process changes.
How to find out what automating your company would cost
Every process has a different price, because every company has a different combination of systems, volume, and complexity. There's no reliable generic price table — there's a diagnosis.
At MWebS, that diagnosis starts by mapping your company's processes, measuring criticality, volume, and time currently spent, to then show exactly where automation pays for itself fastest — and where the first step might be something else.
Still not sure what process automation actually is? Start here.
Want to know what automating your company's processes would cost? Talk to us for a free diagnosis.