Most businesses choosing an automation vendor are buying something they cannot easily evaluate. You can judge a website by looking at it. You cannot judge an automation until it has been running for a month and something has gone wrong.
That asymmetry is where the money gets lost. This is the checklist we would use if we were on your side of the table — and if you want to see what a straight proposal looks like, our automation pricing is published rather than quoted on request.
Before you take any sales calls
Write down the process, badly
You do not need a formal process map. You need three bullet points: what triggers this work, what a person does step by step, and where it goes wrong. Ten minutes of this is worth more than any vendor's discovery deck, because it tells you whether the process is actually understood inside your own business.
If nobody can describe it the same way twice, that is your finding. It also means discovery will be a real cost — see below.
Work out what it costs you now
Hours a week, times people doing it, times loaded hourly cost, times 52. Loaded cost is roughly 1.25–1.4× the raw wage once you add payroll taxes and benefits.
This number is your negotiating position and your sanity check. If the annual cost of the manual work is $4,000, a $15,000 build is not a good trade no matter how impressive the demo. Our ROI calculator does this arithmetic and subtracts the running costs most vendors leave out.
Evaluating the vendor
Look for the word "no" in their history
Ask what they have refused to build. Every experienced automation team has told a client that a process was not worth automating, or that a $30 tool would solve it. A vendor who has never said no to a project has either not been doing this long or is not being straight with you.
Ask what happens on the bad day
Specifically: what happens when the automation is not confident, when a third-party API is down, and when it produces a wrong result nobody notices for a week. The answers should be routing to a human, retry with alerting, and a run log you can audit. Vague answers here are the single strongest predictor of trouble later.
Check whether they will use existing tools
A vendor who always recommends custom code has one hammer. Sometimes Zapier is the right answer and a good agency will say so — we do, regularly, and we have written up where no-code genuinely wins. If custom is proposed, ask what specifically the no-code option cannot do.
Ask about model costs explicitly
Anything with AI in it has a per-use cost that scales with volume. Get an estimate based on your volume, and ask whether it is billed to your own provider account or marked up through them. Yours is better: you can see every dollar and change provider without renegotiating.
The three clauses that matter
Most automation disputes are not about quality. They are about ownership. Get these in writing before you sign.
- Ownership and handover. Name every asset: workflow definitions, source code, server access, API keys, provider accounts, documentation. "You own the output" is too vague — it has been argued to mean the data rather than the system.
- What happens if you stop working together. The automations should keep running. If they live inside the vendor's platform account, they stop, and you will discover this at the worst possible moment.
- Scope and change requests. Fixed price should mean fixed. Get the scope written as a list of workflows with their trigger and end state, and get the hourly rate for anything outside it. "Two rounds of revisions" is a boundary, not a formality.
Red flags worth walking away from
- Percentage savings claims with no reference to your numbers. "Reduce costs by 70%" is not a claim about your business.
- A monthly platform fee for something they built for you. Build fees and hosting costs are legitimate. A recurring licence to use your own automation is rent.
- No documentation in the deliverables. An automation only the vendor understands is a dependency you did not agree to buy.
- Pressure to start company-wide. The correct first project is small, boring and high-volume.
- An accuracy number with no test set. "95% accurate" means nothing without a measured set of your real examples. Ask to see how it was measured, and ask to keep the test set.
A sensible way to run the process
- Write your three bullet points and calculate the annual cost of the manual work.
- Talk to three vendors across different tiers — a no-code freelancer, an agency, and one more expensive option — so you can see the shape of the market.
- Ask all three the "what happens when it is wrong" question and compare the answers.
- Get written scope, ownership and running-cost estimates from your shortlist.
- Start with one process. Judge the work. Then expand.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a first automation project take?
About two weeks for a single process including proper process mapping, and three to five weeks for a department. Substantially longer usually means the scope is bigger than one process; substantially shorter usually means discovery was skipped.
Is it safe to give a vendor access to our systems?
With the right controls, yes. Sign an NDA first, grant scoped access rather than admin where possible, use enterprise AI endpoints that do not train on your data, and require audit logging on every automated action. Any vendor who finds these requests unusual is the wrong vendor.
What if we are not sure what to automate?
That is what a proper audit is for. It should produce a ranked list by hours saved per dollar spent — including the honest answer if nothing on it is worth doing yet. Ours is free and comes with no obligation.
Should the cheapest quote win?
Only if the scope is genuinely comparable, which it rarely is. Get every quote to state the number of workflows, the systems connected, whether AI steps are included, what happens with exceptions, and whether discovery is in the price. The spread usually collapses once they are like for like.
Want to see what a straight proposal looks like? Our automation pricing is published, fixed, and confirmed in writing before any work starts. Book a free 30-minute audit there, or message us on WhatsApp.
