A metered automation platform charges by task or operation, so the bill scales with your transaction volume rather than with the complexity of the work — which is why costs can climb sharply without anything new being built.
It usually arrives quietly. A couple of hundred a month becomes over a thousand, and none of it bought you anything new.
Fixed scope, fixed price, and a 100% money-back guarantee for 7 days after handover.
Nothing went wrong. Your volume grew, which is the good problem, and the bill grew with it because you are charged per operation rather than for the work. At some point you are paying rent on plumbing — and the more successful you get, the more it costs to keep doing the same thing.
Stay and pay, which is genuinely the right answer more often than a vendor will admit. Move it yourself to something self-hosted, which trades a monthly bill for the job of running infrastructure — real work, not free. Or have it moved and handed over, so it runs on your own accounts and costs roughly what a small server costs. The third is what we do, and it only makes sense above a threshold.
Below a few hundred a month, moving is almost never worth it. The migration costs more than the savings for a long time, and you take on operational responsibility you did not have. Somewhere past about a thousand a month the arithmetic flips, and past that it flips hard — because the platform bill keeps scaling with your volume while a self-hosted one largely does not. We will tell you which side of that line you are on before quoting anything.
The cost is the reason people call, but it is rarely the biggest change. Running on your own infrastructure means your customer data stops traversing a third party, your workflows are readable and exportable rather than locked in a format only that vendor opens, and your automation stops being a subscription you cannot cancel without losing a piece of your operation. If you stop working with us, it keeps running.
Broadly, when the monthly bill is being driven by volume rather than by features, and when it is large enough that a one-time migration pays back inside a sensible period. Under a few hundred a month it usually is not worth it and we will say so. The other trigger is non-financial: if you need your customer data to stop passing through a third party, that can justify the move at any bill size.
Mapping what you currently run and what it touches, rebuilding those workflows somewhere you own, running both in parallel until the new one is demonstrably correct, then cutting over and decommissioning the old one. The parallel-run step is the one people skip and the one that prevents a bad week. It is scoped and fixed-price after a free audit, like everything else we sell.
You own it and it runs on your accounts. Whether you also operate it is your choice — some clients take it entirely in-house, which is a completely legitimate outcome and one we build for deliberately. Others take Managed Automation from $499/mo so somebody is watching it, patching it, and adapting it when an upstream service changes. Both are real options and the build is identical.
Not automatically — that is the honest answer. A hosted platform handles uptime for you, and taking that on is a real trade. What makes it reliable is the same thing that makes any automation reliable: loud failures, self-healing selection, write-back so nothing double-processes, and somebody paying attention. If nobody is going to watch it, staying on the platform may genuinely be the better call.
Thirty minutes, no charge. You leave with a written list of what is worth automating, what is not, and roughly what each would cost — and that list is yours whether you hire us or not.