You've got a workflow you want to automate. You've googled "ai automation cost" and "how much does ai cost" and the first page is mostly agency homepages telling you to book a call to find out. You've checked three agency websites and none of them publish pricing. You've watched a sales-led webinar that said "ROI varies." You're trying to budget a project for the next quarter and you have nothing to budget against.
This post is the one I wish existed when I started quoting clients. Real 2026 UK numbers, broken out by tier, by build type, by vertical, with the things that move the price up or down named explicitly. I run Laires Labs, a solo AI engineering studio in London. The numbers below come from my own builds, public competitor pricing pages I've scraped during research, and conversations with agency buyers in the UK market over the last two years.
The short answer
Custom AI automation in the UK in 2026 falls into three pricing tiers. Zapier or n8n resellers: £800-£5,000 per workflow as a one-off, plus £40-£200 per month in platform subscriptions. AI-labelled generalist consultancies: £5,000-£40,000 for strategy engagements, with implementation usually scoped and billed separately. Engineer-led custom shops (Laires Labs sits here): £12,500-£25,000 for a single-workflow build, £30,000-£60,000 for larger multi-workflow projects, plus £100-£400 per month for hosting and LLM API costs. The right tier depends on what you're building, how core it is to your business, and what happens at year three. The rest of this post breaks each down.
What you actually pay at each tier
Pricing transparency is rare in the AI automation space. Most agencies hide their numbers behind a discovery call. Below is the most concrete breakdown I can publish based on real 2026 UK market data, including a few competitor numbers I've scraped publicly.
Tier 1: Zapier or n8n resellers
These agencies build inside someone else's SaaS workflow platform. Most ranking for "ai automation agency uk" sit here. They configure Zapier, n8n, or Make workflows for specific business use cases and charge a margin on top of the underlying platform subscription.
One UK agency on the first page of the SERP for "ai automation agency uk" publishes this pricing openly:
| Service | Price |
|---|---|
| Automation strategy | from £3,200 |
| Individual automation setup | from £800 |
| AI agents | from £4,000 |
| Personalised outreach builds | from £1,200 |
| Custom dashboards | from £2,400 |
| Retained services | from £200/month |
| Day rate | £800 |
Most resellers in the same tier don't publish, but these numbers are broadly representative. A simple workflow is £800-£2,500. A more involved one is £3,000-£5,000. An "AI agent" (usually a chatbot wrapped around a data source) is £4,000-£8,000. Ongoing retainers are £200-£1,500 per month.
What you pay on top: the underlying SaaS subscription. Zapier Professional is £45 per month; the Team and Company plans go to £350 and £550 per month respectively. n8n is free self-hosted or £50-£500 per month managed. Make sits between. For a single workflow you're looking at £45-£100 per month minimum.
Tier 2: AI-labelled generalist consultancies
These are the strategy-led firms. Multiple consultants, named methodologies, four-to-six-week discovery phases, decks. They sell research and roadmap work before any code is written.
Pricing isn't usually published, so the ranges below come from conversations with buyers and from public enterprise consultancy rate cards.
| Phase | Price |
|---|---|
| Discovery (4-6 weeks) | £5,000-£15,000 |
| Full strategy engagement | £15,000-£40,000 |
| Implementation (if kept in-house) | £20,000+, scoped after strategy |
| Implementation (if subcontracted) | usually billed at tier-1 rates with consultancy margin |
The headline cost looks high. The hidden cost is that the deliverable is often a slide deck and a roadmap, and the implementation step that turns the deck into running software is a separate engagement. Buyers occasionally pay £25,000 for strategy work and another £40,000 for build phases that get subcontracted to a tier-1 reseller who'd have charged £8,000 directly.
Tier 3: Engineer-led custom shops
This is the smallest category in the market and where Laires Labs sits. The shop is run or led by someone who writes code. The deliverable is custom software that runs on your infrastructure and integrates with whatever stack you already have. Pricing is per-project with a published or semi-published floor.
| Build type | Price |
|---|---|
| Single-workflow custom build | £12,500-£25,000 |
| Multi-workflow build (2-4 workflows, shared infra) | £30,000-£60,000 |
| Larger ongoing engagement (full automation layer for a services business) | £60,000-£150,000 |
| Retained engineering | £500-£3,000/month, scoped |
The Laires Labs floor is £12,500. Specific reasons covered below.
Build cost vs ongoing cost
A one-off £15,000 build is not a £15,000 cost. There are three ongoing components every buyer needs to budget for.
Hosting. £20-£100 per month for most builds on Render or AWS. Higher if the build needs always-on workers or substantial storage. A typical workflow build runs on a £30-£40 per month Render service plus a £10-£20 per month Postgres or Turso database.
LLM API calls. Variable, scales with usage. A workflow that calls Claude or GPT for 200 decisions a day at moderate token counts runs about £40-£120 per month. A higher-volume workflow (1,000+ decisions a day, longer prompts) can run £200-£800 per month. Anthropic and OpenAI publish per-token pricing; budget conservatively in the first quarter and tighten once you have real usage data.
Maintenance. The variable that catches buyers out. APIs change. Vendor endpoints deprecate. New requirements emerge. A custom build will need either a retained engineer (£500-£3,000 per month depending on scope) or ad-hoc work at day rates (£600-£1,500 per day). Build that into year-one budgeting at minimum £3,000-£6,000.
For a typical small-business build running a few hundred LLM calls a day with light hosting needs, expect £150-£400 per month all in across the three components. For a heavier build, £400-£1,500.
Real numbers per vertical
The buyer's guides I've published earlier each include 2-year total-cost-of-ownership math for a specific vertical. The summary, comparing the SaaS-plus-reseller path against an engineer-led custom path:
| Vertical | Firm size | SaaS path 2-year total | Custom path 2-year total | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Recruitment | 10 recruiters | £68,240 | £58,000-£61,000 | Detail |
| Law | 8 fee earners | £51,440 | £47,640-£50,640 | Detail |
| Accountancy | 9 staff | £43,824 | £45,264-£48,264 | Detail |
The pattern across all three: at small firm sizes the totals are close. The custom path's economic argument shows in year three or four, when the SaaS path's per-seat fees scale linearly with headcount and the custom path's marginal cost of supporting a tenth or fifteenth user is roughly zero.
Why the £12,500 floor exists
The most common buyer pushback I get on the floor: "can't you do something smaller for £5,000?" The honest answer is no, and the reasons are about cost structure, not gatekeeping.
A real custom build needs the following work, regardless of how small the workflow is:
- Discovery and scoping (1-3 days). Mapping the current workflow, understanding the inputs, agreeing on success criteria, writing a build brief.
- Build (1-3 weeks). The actual engineering work, plus tests, plus error handling, plus the integrations your build needs.
- Deployment to your infrastructure (1-2 days). Setting up hosting, secrets management, observability, the deploy pipeline.
- Documentation (1-2 days). What the build does, how to extend it, what to do if it breaks.
- Handoff and post-launch support (2 weeks). Catching the edge cases that only show up in real use.
That work is roughly two to four weeks of senior engineering time minimum. At UK senior contractor day rates of £600-£1,200, that's £8,000-£15,000 in pure labour cost before any margin. Anything below the floor either underdelivers (no documentation, no error handling, no post-launch support) or loses the agency money on the engagement.
If your project genuinely is a £5,000 job, the right answer isn't to hire an engineer-led shop on a stripped-back contract. The right answer is to hire a Zapier reseller in tier 1, or to use Zapier directly yourself. Both will serve you better than a thin custom build.
What changes the price up or down
Inside each tier, several factors move the price within the range.
Up:
- Multi-system integrations (every additional API adds 1-3 days of work)
- Custom UI for end users (a dashboard for the team is typically 5-15 days extra)
- High data volumes that need optimisation work
- Strict compliance requirements (SRA, MLR, HIPAA, GDPR DPIA work)
- Very heterogeneous existing stack (every special-case system adds bridging work)
- Unfamiliar third-party APIs (especially older SOAP APIs, on-prem systems, undocumented endpoints)
Down:
- Modern, well-documented APIs on the third-party side (Stripe, HubSpot, Notion, Slack, Xero, Trigger.dev, Anthropic - all easy to integrate against)
- Clear success criteria and limited scope
- An internal champion at the client who can answer questions in hours, not days
- A workflow that doesn't need a custom UI (back-office or scheduled jobs only)
- Flexibility on hosting (your existing AWS or Render account, no new procurement)
The hidden costs to budget for
Three categories of cost that buyers underbudget consistently.
Vendor or platform subscriptions you'll add as a result of the build. Custom code often needs a paid LLM API tier, a paid AML or enrichment provider, a paid email or SMS service. £100-£500 per month on top of the build is normal.
Internal time during the project. A discovery call is free. The hours your operations manager will spend reviewing drafts, answering integration questions, testing the build, and onboarding the team are not. Budget 20-40 hours of internal stakeholder time across a typical 4-6 week build.
Year-two tweaks and feature requests. No build is finished on launch. The team starts using it, finds the edge cases, asks for the small additions that turn out to matter. Budget £3,000-£6,000 of year-two engineering time for any project worth doing.
When to skip the agency
Three scenarios where the honest advice is "don't hire anyone."
The problem is small. A two-step Zapier workflow that costs £40 per month forever beats a £5,000 reseller engagement and a £15,000 custom build for the same job. If the work fits inside Zapier's free or Starter tier and you have a non-engineer on staff who can configure it, do that.
You already have an engineer. If you have a full-time engineer or a long-term contractor, they can build most automation workflows faster than an agency can scope them. The exception is highly specialised work (specific LLM eval pipelines, complex integration with rare APIs, AI-first systems where the engineering judgement is unusual) where an external specialist is genuinely faster.
The cost won't pay back. If the workflow saves 30 minutes a week of a £30,000 employee's time, that's £390 per year of value. A £15,000 build doesn't make sense, even if the workflow is genuinely automatable. Run the back-of-envelope payback math before scoping.
Book a call
If you're sitting on a workflow problem and trying to work out what tier of agency would actually help, that's the call to book. Twenty minutes, no pitch. Tell me the workflow, the systems involved, and the rough business case. I'll give you a direct read on which tier fits, what I'd scope if custom is the answer, and a price range you can actually take to your board. You walk away with a one-page write-up of the build, the price, and the SaaS or internal-hire alternative if either is cheaper. Yours to keep whether you hire me or not.
Don't book if your budget is under £10,000, if you want generic AI strategy, or if you already have an in-house engineer. The right answer in each of those cases is somewhere other than Laires Labs.
Book a 20-minute call or read the full AI automation agency buyer's guide for the underlying framework on agency archetypes.
Thinking about a system like this?
20-minute call, no slides. We'll map it against your stack and I'll tell you if it's worth building.
Book a callQuestions buyers actually ask
Three tiers. At the Zapier or n8n reseller tier, £800-£5,000 for a single workflow plus £40-£200 per month subscription. At the AI-labelled consultancy tier, £5,000-£40,000 for a strategy engagement, with implementation usually billed separately. At the engineer-led custom tier, £12,500-£25,000 for a single-workflow build, £30,000-£60,000 for larger multi-workflow projects, plus £100-£300 per month for hosting and LLM API costs. All figures exclude VAT and reflect 2026 UK market prices.
Robin Laires
Ten years software engineering, former tech lead at Jellyfish — one of the UK's largest independent digital agencies. Now I build custom AI systems that replace manual business processes: ads ops, sales intelligence, intake routing, research pipelines. One engineer, installed into your stack.