"We lose 4 hours a week copying stuff from one Excel file to another." That's what I hear most when a small business owner contacts me about automation. Not "we want AI" or "we need digital transformation." Just: we waste time on repetitive work and we'd like it to stop.
The problem is nobody knows what it costs. Automation agencies sell "process audits" at EUR 3,000 before writing a single line of code. No-code platforms promise "everything without a developer" — until the day it isn't, and the Zapier scenario loops at 2 AM generating 47,000 emails.
Here are five automations I delivered over the past two years. Real prices, real timelines, and what went wrong.
1. Automated competitor price monitoring — EUR 480
The need: an auto parts e-commerce owner manually checks prices from 3 competitors across 200 references every Monday. Three hours of copy-paste into a spreadsheet.
