Is Utomat Worth the Price? Here's How I Think About It

A few months ago someone emailed me after poking around Utomat, AI automation, built in public and asked a pretty direct question: "What does this actually cost, and is it worth it?"

Fair question. I'd ask the same thing.

The honest answer is: it depends what you're currently doing instead. And I mean that in the most literal, not-a-cop-out way possible. Whether paying someone to build you a custom automation makes sense has almost everything to do with what the alternative looks like for you specifically. So let me walk through how I actually think about it.

The Real Comparison Isn't "Free vs Paid"

Most people frame the pricing question wrong from the start. They compare "paying for automation" against "not paying for automation." But that's not the real comparison. The real comparison is "paying for automation" against "paying for the thing you're doing instead."

Right now, someone on your team, maybe you, is probably doing something by hand that happens over and over. Maybe it's copying lead info from a form into your CRM. Maybe it's sending the same follow-up email sequence manually every time someone fills something out. Maybe it's chasing down invoices every month like it's a new idea each time.

That work has a cost. It's just invisible because it shows up as salary, or as your own time, which you've already decided doesn't count.

According to data from McKinsey, around 45% of work activities could be automated using current technology. That's not a future forecast. That's right now. Most of what eats your week already has a machine-readable version of itself.

What I Actually Charge For (And Why)

I'm not going to put a price list on this page, because the honest answer is that the work varies too much. A simple two-step zap that nobody's thought to set up yet takes a few hours. A multi-system sync with conditional logic, error handling, and a dashboard to see what's happening takes a lot more.

What I can tell you is what you're paying for when you work with me:

You're Paying for Time You Get Back

If you or someone you employ is spending ten hours a month on a task, and that person earns $40 an hour, that's $400 a month in labor. Every month. Forever, until someone stops it.

That's $4,800 a year on one task. A small automation project that costs a few hundred dollars to build and essentially nothing to run pays for itself quickly, and then keeps paying.

I built a thing called CallCrewHQ partly to solve this kind of math for service businesses, the economics of who's doing what, and whether the humans should be doing it at all.

You're Paying for Something That Doesn't Get Tired

Humans doing repetitive data work make mistakes. Not because they're bad at their jobs, because nobody can stay fully focused on copy-paste work for hours. Automated processes don't have that problem. They do the same thing the same way every time, which turns out to be genuinely valuable when you're dealing with customer records or financial data.

A 2024 report from Salesforce found that IT and operations teams consistently rank data quality and manual process errors among their top concerns. The errors aren't the dramatic ones. They're the quiet accumulation of small mistakes that you discover months later.

You're Paying to Stop Thinking About It

This one is underrated. There's a cognitive cost to knowing a thing needs doing. Every month when the invoicing routine comes around, you have to remember it, start it, track it, and finish it. Automating it doesn't just save the hours, it removes the thing from your mental list entirely.

That's genuinely hard to put a number on. But if you've ever felt that specific relief when something just happens without you touching it, you know what I'm talking about.

When It Doesn't Make Sense

I'd rather tell you this now than have you find out after we've talked.

Custom automation doesn't make sense if the task happens rarely. If you do something once a quarter, there's probably no case for automating it. The setup time and maintenance overhead won't pay off.

It also doesn't make sense if the task genuinely requires human judgment every time. There are things that look repetitive but actually have a lot of subtle decision-making buried inside them. Those are harder to automate well, and getting it wrong is worse than not doing it.

And it doesn't make sense if you're not sure you want to keep doing the thing at all. Sometimes the right move is to stop the process entirely, not to make it faster.

I wrote a bit more about this kind of thinking on the Blog, Utomat if you want to poke around.

The "Just Use Zapier" Question

Someone always asks this. And honestly, yes, sometimes Zapier or Make or a similar tool is the right answer. I've built plenty of things on top of those platforms. They're good.

But there's a ceiling. The no-code tools are fast to set up and fine for simple linear flows. They get expensive and messy when you need things like:

Conditional logic that branches based on the data
Error handling that actually tells you when something fails
Custom integrations with tools that don't have off-the-shelf connectors
Anything that touches your database directly

When you hit that ceiling, you're either paying for an increasingly complicated stack of no-code tools (which gets hard to maintain and understand), or you're getting something built properly.

I moved away from one such stack for my own site a while back. I wrote about a version of that kind of thinking in a post about why I moved my studio site off Firebase, the short version is that "free and easy" has hidden costs that show up later.

A Simple Way to Think About Your Own Numbers

Before you talk to anyone about automation, including me, do this exercise:

1. Pick one repetitive task you or your team does regularly. 2. Time it. Actually time it, don't estimate. 3. Multiply the hours per month by the hourly cost of whoever does it. 4. Multiply that by 12.

That's your annual cost for that one task. If that number is bigger than what you'd pay to automate it, the math is in favor of doing something about it.

Most people are surprised by the number they get. The tasks feel small because they're routine. But routine doesn't mean cheap.

You can read a bit more about me and how I think about this work on the About, Utomat page.

So Is It Worth It?

For most of the people who ask me this question: yes. Not because automation is magic, but because the thing they're comparing it against turns out to cost more than they thought.

The question isn't really "is this worth the price." The question is "what am I actually spending right now, and do I want to keep spending it."

If you want to work through that math for your own situation, drop me a message. I'm happy to talk through what you've got going on before anything else.

Related reading: Utome, Utomat, and the Typo That Keeps Finding Me.