The subscription is the cheapest part.
That is the number everyone quotes, because it is the only one printed on a website. Twenty seats, a monthly fee, done.
Then the real bill arrives... spread across five categories nobody budgeted for, most of them paid in hours rather than dollars.
1. Licenses
The visible one. Per seat, per month, usually billed yearly for a discount.
Two traps live here.
The first is buying seats for everyone. In most 20 person businesses, five to eight people will use AI daily and the rest will open it twice. Start narrow. Expand when someone complains they do not have access.
The second is stacking. One team buys a writing tool. Another buys a meeting recorder. Someone else expenses a research tool. Nobody sees the total until the card statement lands.
2. Usage
Build anything custom and you pay per use instead of per seat.
This one surprises people because it grows with success. A workflow that runs fifty times a month costs almost nothing. The same workflow at five thousand runs a month is a real line item.
Estimate volume before you build. Set a spending cap on day one.
3. Build
Getting a workflow from idea to working thing.
A small automation takes days. Something touching your CRM, your email, and a spreadsheet three people maintain by hand takes weeks.
You pay in contractor hours or your own team's hours taken from other work. Both are real. Only one shows up on an invoice.
4. Adoption
The one that sinks budgets.
Training sessions. The awkward fortnight where the new way is slower than the old way. Someone senior answering the same question eleven times. The rework when output goes out wrong and a client notices.
Most of the money goes here, and it stays invisible until you count it.
5. Maintenance
AI tools change under you. Prices move. Models get retired. A prompt that worked in March gets strange in September.
Budget a few hours a month for someone to check things still work. Skip it and a customer tells you.
Work out your own number
Benchmarks hide the thing that will bite you. Use your own numbers.
Take one workflow you are considering. Answer six questions.
- How many hours a month does this take today? Count the checking and the fixing too.
- What does an hour of that person cost you? Salary plus super and overheads, divided down.
- How many of those hours would realistically disappear? Assume half of what the vendor claims.
- What will licenses and usage cost for the people involved?
- How many hours to build it, and whose hours are they?
- How many weeks until people use it without being reminded?
Multiply one and two for your current cost. Multiply three by that rate for your saving. Compare against four, five, and six.
Now you have a payback period instead of a feeling.
What a healthy number looks like
Rough guidance, and only rough.
Payback inside two months, you should have started already.
Payback beyond six months, treat it as a nice to have. Interesting, worth revisiting, wrong as a first project.
In between, look at strategic value. Some workflows earn their place through what they teach your team, even when the direct math is thin.
Where the money gets wasted
Three patterns show up over and over in businesses this size.
Buying tools before understanding the work. The tool arrives, then someone goes looking for a problem it solves. Expensive, and it teaches your team that AI wanders around in search of a purpose.
Paying for dormant seats. Check your usage dashboard this month. In most businesses a third of the seats sit unopened, renewed every year.
Building custom when settings would do. Custom feels serious. It also costs five times more and needs maintenance forever. Exhaust the options inside tools you already pay for first.
The cheapest thing you can do
Count before you buy.
Two hours mapping where the hours actually go will tell you more than any vendor demo. Most businesses find their expensive workflow somewhere nobody was looking... reconciliation, quoting, the report someone rebuilds every Monday morning.
You cannot price a solution until you have priced the problem.
Score your own workflows in two minutes.
The AI Opportunity Audit ranks your workflows by AI fit and shows effort, cost, and payback for each one. You keep the map whether we work together or not.
Vendor pricing changes often. Treat any figure you read online, including here, as a starting point for your own quote.