Pricing guide
RPA and process automation pricing — plus the payback maths
A well-chosen automation pays for itself; a badly chosen one just relocates the work.
Somewhere in your company, right now, someone is copying data from an email into a spreadsheet, then from the spreadsheet into an invoicing tool. Three hours a week, every week, for years. That is precisely the kind of work automation removes, and in 2026 the pricing tiers look like this: a single-task automation — extracting data from emails or PDFs, generating documents automatically, moving records between two applications — costs €1,000–5,000. An API integration between systems that do not talk natively (your online store and inventory, your CRM and invoicing) runs €3,000–15,000. Automating an entire flow with RPA — from order received to invoice issued, with software robots operating the applications a person used to — sits around €10,000–30,000. The numbers matter less than the right question, though: how many hours of repetitive work does the investment eliminate, and what are those hours worth? Buyers in the UK, Germany or the Netherlands who nearshore this work to Romania get an extra lever here — the same engineering delivered inside the EU at rates that shorten the payback period considerably. The formula below answers the question before you request a single quote.
Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247
Key takeaways
Single-task automation: €1,000–5,000
Data extraction from emails or PDF invoices, automatic contract and report generation, syncing a file between two applications. Delivered in 2–4 weeks, typical payback under a year.
API integration between systems: €3,000–15,000
Two applications wired together directly — web-shop orders straight into inventory, CRM clients straight into invoicing. Retyping disappears for good, and its errors with it.
Full-flow RPA: €10,000–30,000
Software robots executing complete processes end to end, including inside legacy applications without an API. Justified at real volume: hundreds of operations a day across several departments.
The ROI calculation, without cosmetics
The formula is banal, which is exactly why it works: hours saved per month × the employee's fully loaded hourly cost (gross salary plus taxes, not net) × 12, set against the investment plus upkeep. A concrete case: a back office loses 40 hours a month manually entering orders into the inventory system. At a fully loaded €12/hour, that is €5,760 a year. A €6,000 API integration pays back in about 13 months and saves net from year two — on top of eliminating typing errors, which carry their own cost on wrong invoices. Add automation upkeep to the maths, roughly 10–15% a year, because the connected applications change and the integration has to follow.
Knowing when NOT to automate matters just as much. Below roughly 5 hours saved per month, the investment rarely holds up — payback stretches past 3–4 years, by which time the process may have changed anyway. Do not automate chaotic processes either: if the flow has undocumented exceptions only one person knows how to resolve, the robot will execute them wrongly at high speed. The honest rule: tidy the process first, automate it second. And check the cheap alternative before requesting any quote — no-code tools like Zapier or Make, at €20–50/month, cover a surprising number of simple scenarios with zero development cost.
Frequently asked questions
Which processes should be automated first?
The ones ticking three boxes at once: they repeat often (daily or weekly), they follow clear rules with no human judgement, and they consume measurable time. Typical first candidates are order intake, recurring invoicing and monthly reporting — not rare processes or ones riddled with exceptions.
RPA versus an API integration — what is the cost difference?
An API integration connects systems directly at data level — more robust and cheaper over time, but both applications need an API. RPA simulates a user clicking through the interface, so it works on old software without APIs, yet costs more to maintain: any interface change can stop the robot.
Does automation mean I have to let people go?
In small companies, almost never — the freed hours shift toward work that brings in money: sales, client relationships, quality control. At 10–50 employees the real ROI rarely comes from headcount cuts and usually from the same people processing 2–3 times the volume without new hires.
How long does an automation project take?
As a guide: a single-task automation 2–4 weeks, an API integration 4–8 weeks, a complete RPA flow 2–4 months. The first week is always mapping the real process — which almost always differs from the one described initially, and the exceptions found there are the main source of final-price variation.
Similar pages
Related resources
Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247