Free tool

Automation savings calculator

This automation savings calculator turns the hours your team spends on repetitive admin — answering the phone, chasing leads, booking jobs, asking for reviews — into a monthly and annual dollar figure, then sets that figure against Hitman Marketing’s published AI operations tiers to show payback in months.

What the manual work costs

Cost of handling it manually

$17,472 / year

12 hours a week at $28 an hour is $1,456 a month, across 52 weeks. At 60% automatable, 7.2 of those hours and $874 a month are the ceiling on what automation could take off the table.

Manual cost / month: $1,456
Automatable share / month: $874
Automatable share / year: $10,483
Hours reclaimed / week: 7.2 hrs

Lead Engine

$497/mo · $997 setup · 3-month minimum

Retainer / mo: $497
One-time build: $997
Net vs manual cost / mo: $377
Payback on the build: 2.6 months
First-year net: $3,522

Speed-to-lead capture, routing, follow-up sequences, review engine and booking.

Ops Build

$997/mo · $6,500 build · 6-month minimum

Retainer / mo: $997
One-time build: $6,500
Net vs manual cost / mo: -$123
Payback on the build: Not at these inputs
First-year net: -$7,981

Two production workflows, voice and chat intake, CRM sync, lead scoring and reporting.

Ops Platform

$1,499/mo · $15,000 build · 12 months

Retainer / mo: $1,499
One-time build: $15,000
Net vs manual cost / mo: -$625
Payback on the build: Not at these inputs
First-year net: -$22,505

Four to six workflows across CRM, calendar, phone and billing, with a custom dashboard.

Arithmetic on your own three inputs, not a projection — and the tiers are compared on published per-component prices only. Reclaimed hours usually turn into capacity rather than a smaller payroll, so treat the annual figure as the cost of the work, not as cash that appears.

How do you calculate the cost of manual admin work?

Manual admin work costs weekly hours multiplied by a loaded hourly rate — wage plus payroll tax, benefits, software seats and supervision — annualised over fifty-two weeks. Multiply that by the share of the work that follows rules rather than judgement, and you have the ceiling on what any automation could remove.

Two things go wrong when owners do this in their head. The first is using the base wage, which understates the real cost of an hour by a wide and business-specific margin — the loaded figure is the one that leaves the bank account. The second is counting only the person who nominally owns the task, when in a small service business the phone, the follow-up and the rebooking get handled by whoever is nearest, including the owner at nine at night.

Count every person who touches the work, not the one whose job description mentions it.
Use a loaded rate, not a wage — payroll tax, benefits, software seats, supervision.
Count the interruption, not just the task: a two-minute call that breaks a quote costs more than two minutes.
Leave judgement work out of the automatable share. Quoting a complex job and handling an upset customer belong to a person.

Which repetitive tasks are worth automating first?

Repetitive tasks worth automating first are the high-frequency ones that cost real money when they slip: inbound calls and form leads, follow-up until someone actually replies, appointment booking and reminders, review requests at job completion, and writing all of it back into the CRM without anyone retyping anything.

Ordering matters more than coverage. Start with the workflow that runs most often and hurts most when it fails, prove it, then extend — rather than scoping a six-workflow platform from a sales conversation and discovering in month three which two of them were the point. The reverse order is the most common way these projects disappoint.

How long does an automation build take to pay for itself?

An automation build pays for itself once the monthly cost it removes exceeds the retainer, and the one-time build cost divided by that monthly surplus is the payback period. Hitman Marketing publishes both halves: retainers of $497, $997 and $1,499 a month, after builds of $997, $6,500 and $15,000.

Tier	Monthly	One-time build	Minimum term
Lead Engine	$497/mo	$997 setup	3-month minimum
Ops Build	$997/mo	$6,500 build	6-month minimum
Ops Platform	$1,499/mo	$15,000 build	12 months

The calculator runs all three tiers against the same number rather than recommending one, because the honest answer is usually visible in the arithmetic. Below roughly ten hours a week of rule-shaped admin, only the entry tier repays a build inside a year; the platform tier earns its price when four to six workflows span the CRM, the calendar, the phone and billing at once. A tier that never crosses breakeven at your volume is information, not a failure of the tool.

Related: Published pricing

What does this calculator deliberately leave out?

This calculator leaves out everything it cannot get from you honestly: revenue recovered from leads that currently go unanswered, jobs booked after hours, platform and telephony usage beyond the retainer, and the reality that reclaimed hours usually become capacity rather than a smaller payroll.

Those omissions cut both ways, and both directions are stated here on purpose. Left out on the upside: the revenue side entirely — an automation that answers a lead in a minute is usually worth far more in booked work than in recovered admin hours, and none of that appears above. Left out on the downside: voice minutes and messaging beyond the included allowance, which are billed as overage rather than absorbed, and the carrier registration that gates any texting go-live by one to four weeks.

What is deliberately absent is any bundled or discounted price. Every figure above is a published per-component price, so the comparison stays checkable against the pricing page rather than depending on a package nobody can verify.

What is the next step after running these numbers?

The next step after running these numbers is a mapped process, not a proposal. Hitman Marketing's AI operations pillar covers what actually gets built; the $1,500 automation audit maps three workflows against your own call log and job values, delivers a written roadmap, and is credited in full against any build started within 60 days.

See AI operations The $1,500 automation audit

Common questions

Which tier does this calculator recommend?: None of them — it shows all three published tiers against the same number so you can see which one your own volume actually supports. A business with a few hours a week of admin is a Lead Engine business; the platform tier only makes arithmetic sense when several systems are involved. The audit is how that gets decided on evidence.
Related: The $1,500 automation audit
What loaded hourly cost should I enter?: Your own, built from your payroll: wage, employer payroll tax, benefits, the software seats that person occupies, and a share of the time someone spends supervising the work. Do not borrow a national average — labour costs in Pinellas County vary enormously by role, and a borrowed figure makes the whole result borrowed too.
If nobody gets laid off, is the saving real?: It is real, but it arrives as capacity rather than as cash. The hours come back as jobs quoted the same day, fewer evenings spent on admin, and a hire deferred rather than made. The honest way to bank it is more revenue through the same payroll, which is why the annual figure is labelled a cost of work, not a refund.
Why does the calculator use 52 weeks rather than four-week months?: Because a four-week month quietly deletes a month of work a year. Fifty-two weeks divided by twelve is about 4.33 weeks a month, not four — so the honest monthly figure is roughly eight percent higher than the four-week shortcut, and eight percent is the difference between a payback period that reads well and one that reads honestly.
When would the savings actually start?: After the build, and after carrier registration where texting is in scope. A lead engine takes about two weeks to build, a full operations build four, and a multi-system platform eight to ten. A2P 10DLC messaging registration runs one to four weeks in parallel and cannot be rushed, so it usually sets the go-live date.

Last updated 24 July 2026

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