It is the question everyone asks second and almost nobody answers publicly. Have a look around and you will find plenty of pages about plumbing business automation and very few that put a number anywhere near them.

So here is a straight attempt. Not a price list, because the honest answer depends on what you are automating, but a clear explanation of what you are actually paying for and where the money tends to go.

The three ways it gets priced

Subscription products. The ready made tools, usually one job each, most often answering the phone. These generally advertise in the low hundreds of dollars a month with a setup fee on top. Cheap to start, quick to turn on, and the trade off is that you get what every other customer gets. If your process is standard, that can be fine.

Someone internal having a go. The cheapest on paper, because the software is free or close to it. The real cost shows up later, which is covered further down.

Built around your business. Quoted per project rather than per seat. In Australia this commonly lands anywhere from a few thousand dollars for one narrow process through to tens of thousands for something touching several parts of the business. Anyone who gives you a figure before they have looked at how your week runs is guessing.

What actually moves the price

Three things, and none of them are the ones people expect.

How many systems it has to touch. A job that lives entirely inside one program is straightforward. The moment something has to come out of your job software and land in your accounting, the work roughly doubles, because the two were never designed to talk to each other. This is also where most of the wasted hours are, so it is usually worth paying for.

How different your process is. Plumbing business automation gets cheaper the closer your process sits to everyone else's. If your maintenance contracts are priced in a way nobody else does, that is more work. It is also usually the part that makes you money, so the answer is rarely to change it.

How much needs a person's call. Anything where someone has to use judgement is not automation, it is a prompt to a human. That is a feature rather than a problem, but it does mean the scope of what can be handed over is smaller than people assume, which generally brings the price down rather than up.

The costs that never make it onto the quote

Your own people's time. Expect somebody in the office to spend real hours explaining how things work during the build. That is unavoidable. It is also the single biggest predictor of whether the thing ends up being any good, so it is worth protecting rather than squeezing.

The build nobody owns. The cheapest version of plumbing business automation is usually someone in the office wiring something together themselves. It often works. What it does not come with is anyone to look after it, so when a supplier changes their paperwork or that person is on site for a fortnight, it quietly stops and the office goes back to doing it by hand. Nothing was written down, because it started as a favour.

The second year. The build is the small part. Suppliers change forms, crews change, new people join the office. If the quote has nothing in it for the year after go live, the cost has not gone away, it has just been left out of the number.

A real one, in plumbing

No Bull Plumbing in Townsville handle around 150 job requests a week. Work orders were being written up, then written up again somewhere else, every single time. After the build, that is roughly fifteen hours a week back in the office, in Brad's own figure. Nothing in the business was replaced, and nobody learnt a new program.

That is one plumbing business, not a promise. But it does show where the value usually sits, which is a single repetitive job done many times rather than anything clever.

A better question than what does it cost

What is the job costing you now? A process that eats six hours a week is costing real money whether or not anyone has ever written that figure down.

There is a calculator on our site that gives you a rough number in hours a week. Four questions, under a minute, and the figures behind it sit under what the published research says, on purpose. It is an estimate rather than an audit, and it will tell you fairly quickly whether plumbing business automation is worth a conversation yet.

If it is not, that is a perfectly good answer, and one worth having before anyone quotes you anything.