How much does AI automation cost?
AI automation for a UK business costs a £1,500 audit (refunded if we can’t find at least ten hours a week of savings), then a fixed implementation sprint of £4,000–£8,000, plus an optional care plan from £300 a month and your own tool subscriptions. Every one of these figures is published on this site.
That transparency is deliberate. Too many automation projects are quoted “on application” after a sales call, which hides both the price and the risk. NeuralGen states the figures up front on our full price list and on the AI automation service page, so you can decide whether to proceed before you speak to anyone.
For context, this pricing sits inside a specific structure, not a menu of loosely-related services. The audit is a small, fixed cost that tells you whether automation is worth doing at all, with a built-in refund if it isn’t. The sprint is the one meaningful cost of actually building something, scoped in advance so there are no surprises. And the care plan is entirely optional — many clients maintain their own automations once handed over and never take it. Understanding that structure makes the rest of this guide easier to follow.
What do you actually get for each price?
Each price maps to a distinct stage of work, not a vague retainer — the table below sets out what’s included and how long each stage takes. Comparing it to how a lot of the market prices automation work is instructive: day-rate consultancies bill for hours regardless of outcome, and some platforms charge a percentage of the workflows you run through their system indefinitely. Both models put the financial risk of scope creep, or of an unproductive month, on you rather than the provider.
| Stage | Price | What it includes | Timeframe |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI automation audit | £1,500 (refunded if we can’t find 10+ hours/week saved) | Process mapping, a prioritised list of what to automate, an hours-saved estimate | Around one week |
| Implementation sprint | £4,000–£8,000 fixed | Build, testing on your real data, handover on your own accounts, documentation | Around two weeks |
| Care plan (optional) | From £300/month | Monitoring, fixes, small changes as your process evolves | Ongoing, cancellable |
| Tool subscriptions | Paid by you, on your accounts | Claude, Make, n8n — you own them | Ongoing |
There is no setup fee beyond the audit, no per-seat platform charge, and no lock-in to a proprietary system. If you decide after the audit that automation isn’t worth pursuing, you keep the process map and the prioritised list — the audit still leaves you with something useful, and if we haven’t found at least ten hours a week of savings, you get the £1,500 back regardless.
What changes the price within the range?
Scope drives the number within the £4,000–£8,000 sprint band, not negotiation or how large your business is. Five factors move it up or down.
The number of workflows being automated in one sprint is the biggest driver, followed by how many separate systems each workflow touches — a quoting workflow that only reads your inbox and writes to one CRM is simpler than one that also updates accounting software and a scheduling tool. How standardised your current process already is matters too: a process with one clear path is faster to build than one with several inconsistent variants that all need to be handled. Data cleanliness affects build time, since messy or inconsistent records need extra handling before the automation can trust them. And workflows that need a human sign-off step add a small amount of build complexity versus a fully automatic one, though this is usually a worthwhile trade for anything customer-facing.
None of these factors are hidden or negotiable after the fact — they are exactly what the audit measures. A business automating one clean, well-documented workflow with no sign-off requirement will land near the bottom of the £4,000–£8,000 band; a business automating a multi-step process spanning four systems with messy legacy data will land near the top. Any specific project’s position in the range is <!-- CONFIRM --> until scoped — this is precisely what the audit exists to establish before you commit to a sprint price.
Are there ongoing or hidden costs?
The only recurring costs are your own tool subscriptions — typically modest monthly SaaS fees for Claude, Make and n8n, paid on your own accounts — and, optionally, a care plan from £300 a month if you want us to monitor and maintain the automation. NeuralGen takes no platform cut and holds no logins hostage.
Because every automation is built on accounts you control, you are never billed by us for continued access, and you could in principle take the workflow to another provider or run it yourself without paying us anything further. This is a deliberate structural choice: some automation providers build on their own platform and charge an ongoing licence to keep it running, which effectively means you rent your own workflow back from them indefinitely. NeuralGen’s model avoids that by design.
Is AI automation cheaper than hiring?
For repetitive work, AI automation is usually cheaper over time: a one-off fixed fee keeps paying back every week, while a hire adds a recurring salary plus employer National Insurance — charged at 15% on earnings above £5,000 a year (GOV.UK, 2026/27) — and other on-costs every year. It is not a fair comparison for work that genuinely needs a person’s judgement.
As an illustration only, a workflow costing £4,000–£8,000 to build that saves several hours a week can pay back within a matter of months, after which the saving continues indefinitely at only the cost of the tool subscriptions — whereas a new hire’s cost recurs every year regardless of how much time they save. Treat this as a worked example, not a forecast for your business: the real comparison depends on your own wage rates and the size of the on-costs at the time, and any specific saving figure is <!-- CONFIRM --> until measured. For the fuller version of this comparison, see our post on automating vs hiring, and for where automation reliably pays off in day-to-day admin, see the admin-cost problem.
The comparison also isn’t only about cost. A hire brings judgement, relationship-building and flexibility that no automation can replace, and for genuinely varied or high-stakes work, that’s worth paying for regardless of the maths. The honest framing is that automation and hiring solve different problems: automation removes the cost of repetition, a hire adds capability you don’t currently have. Most growing SMEs end up doing both — automating the repetitive layer of a role so the next hire spends their time on the parts of the job that actually need a person.
Why publish prices when most agencies don’t?
Because opaque pricing wastes everyone’s time and hides risk — a UK SME owner shouldn’t need a sales call to find out whether a service is affordable. Every price on this site is the real number, not a floor to be negotiated up.
NeuralGen is a London AI-visibility and automation agency, and our position is plain: every price is on this site, and there is no “book a call to find out”. You can see the full list on our pricing page before you ever speak to us.
How do you keep the price fixed?
The audit scopes the work before the sprint begins, which is what lets the sprint be quoted as a fixed figure inside the £4,000–£8,000 band rather than billed by the hour. Scoping first removes the two things that usually make automation projects run over: unclear requirements and undiscovered complexity in the data.
That protects you as the client in a simple way — you agree the fixed sprint price after the audit has mapped the real process, not before, so there is no incentive for either side to pad the hours. It also means the risk of underestimating a build sits with NeuralGen, not with you: if a workflow turns out to be more complex than the audit anticipated, that is our estimation to get right, not an invoice you receive halfway through the sprint.
See our pricing page for the complete, published price list.