Every automation platform publishes its monthly price. Almost none of them publish the number that matters: what it costs to get the thing actually working in your business. That gap is where most disappointment lives.
The software is the small part. Depending on the platform and your contact count, you are looking at somewhere between £30 and £300 a month for a small business. Fine. The real cost is the setup — turning a blank account into something that reliably captures enquiries, follows up, and tells you where every opportunity stands.
A minimal, genuinely useful setup — enquiry capture from your website, instant acknowledgement, a CRM record created automatically, an internal alert so somebody picks it up — typically lands between £1,500 and £3,000. Small, but it fixes the single most expensive leak in most businesses: enquiries that sit unanswered overnight.
A proper implementation, which is what most businesses end up wanting once they see the first one working, runs between £4,000 and £10,000. That covers the above plus a nurture sequence written in your voice, pipeline stages that match how you actually sell, lead scoring or at least prioritisation, reporting that tells you which channels produce work, and the integrations that stop anyone retyping data between systems.
Beyond £10,000 you are usually dealing with multiple products or divisions, complex handovers between sales and delivery, integrations with bespoke systems, or migrating years of messy data out of something else.
Where does the money go? Rarely where people expect.
Configuration is the smallest slice. Clicking things into place in a modern platform is quick. What takes time is the thinking that comes first: mapping how an enquiry actually travels through your business, who touches it, what happens when they are on holiday, and what "won" and "lost" really mean to you. Skip that and you automate a broken process at speed.
Content is the biggest slice, every time. An automation sequence is only as good as the emails inside it. Five nurture emails that sound like you, say something useful, and do not read like a template need writing, and that is a proper piece of work. This is where projects either become genuinely valuable or become spam with a schedule.
Data is the slice nobody budgets for. Your existing contacts live in a spreadsheet, an old CRM, an inbox, and someone's phone. Consolidating, de-duplicating and tagging them so the automation has something sane to work with takes hours that are impossible to guess until you look.
Testing is the last slice and the one people cut. Every path needs walking: what happens if someone fills the form twice, unsubscribes, replies to an automated email, or comes back six months later. Cutting this is how businesses end up emailing a client three times about a service they already bought.
There is also an ongoing cost that is worth naming. Automation is not a project that finishes. Sequences need reviewing, offers change, messages get stale, and the reporting only becomes useful once someone looks at it monthly. Budget a small retainer or a regular half day. Businesses that treat automation as install-and-forget get maybe a third of the value.
Is it worth it? The honest test is arithmetic, not enthusiasm. Take the number of enquiries you get in a month, and be honest about how many you follow up more than once. Most owner-managed businesses manage one attempt, and most sales need several. If you get thirty enquiries a month, convert eight, and a client is worth £3,000, then lifting conversion by two clients a month pays for a full implementation in the first quarter. If you get three enquiries a month, fix your lead generation first — automation multiplies what exists, it does not create demand.
That is the sequencing point, and it is the advice we give most often. Automation is a force multiplier. If the enquiries are coming and dropping through the cracks, it is the highest return money you can spend. If nothing is coming in, spend it on the website and the traffic first, then automate.
If you want a figure for your own setup, tell us how enquiries reach you today and what happens next. Twenty minutes is usually enough to scope it honestly.