Automation
Automation
The spreadsheet three people maintain, the queue somebody clears every morning, the report that takes a day a month. Automated properly, and running on your own infrastructure rather than rented forever.
From £75/hrAn estimate before any work startsOne developer, start to finish
01
The work worth automating is usually obvious to everyone and owned by nobody.
It is rarely difficult. It is just never anyone's job — which is why it is still being done by hand two years after someone first said it should not be.
02
What actually gets built
Internal tools
The small admin screens that replace a spreadsheet with something several people can use at once without overwriting each other.
Workflow automation
When this happens, do that: a form arrives, a record is created, a document is generated, someone is told — including the awkward middle steps the off-the-shelf tools stop just short of.
Reporting that runs itself
The numbers assembled on a schedule and delivered, instead of a person rebuilding the same view every month.
Document generation
Contracts, quotes, certificates and statements produced from data rather than from last month's copy of a Word file.
03
How the work runs
You describe it
Two sentences is enough to start. What you are building, who it is for, and where it is stuck if it already exists.
A scope and a price, inside 24 hours
Not a range with a shrug attached: what is in, what is deliberately out, what each stage costs and what it depends on. If something cannot be priced honestly yet, that is said rather than padded.
Built in the open
Your repository from the first commit, deployed somewhere you can see it from the first week. Progress is a working thing you can open, not a status call.
Handed over properly
Your accounts, your keys, your infrastructure, and a README that assumes the reader is not me. Ongoing work can run on a retainer; nothing breaks if it does not.
- Rate
- From £75/hr
- Scope and price
- Inside 24 hours
- Written by
- The person who scoped it
Start with the measurement. How often it runs, how long it takes, and what an error costs. Those three numbers decide what is worth automating — and whether you need a developer at all.
Start a project →Common questions
Is it cheaper to use Zapier or Make than to build something?
Usually yes, at low volume, and that is often the honest recommendation. They get expensive when the task count climbs, and awkward when the logic needs branching, retries or state that a visual builder cannot hold. The useful question is what the per-run cost looks like at ten times today's volume.
What is worth automating first?
The one that runs most often, not the one that annoys people most. Frequency times time saved is the whole calculation. The exception is anything where a human error is expensive — then it is worth automating for correctness alone.
Who maintains it afterwards?
You do, and it is built on that assumption: your repository, your hosting, your credentials, written to be read by whoever comes next. Ongoing work can run on a retainer if you want one, but the point is that nothing breaks if you do not have one.
04
Tell me what you keep doing by hand
Two sentences is plenty. If an off-the-shelf tool would do it, I will tell you that instead — it is cheaper and easier to maintain than anything I would write.