What Business Automation Costs in South Africa (2026)

Most agencies won't give you a number until you've sat through a discovery call. We publish ours, because a range you can sanity-check beats a quote you can't interrogate.

Everything below is the actual arithmetic behind our instant quote tool — the same bases, the same multipliers. If you run the wizard yourself you will land on these figures.

The starting points

Automation work is priced off a base for the kind of build, in rands:

What you need	From
Website	R18,000
Brand & design	R24,000
Systems & internal tools	R38,000
AI integration / automation	R45,000
Web or mobile app	R90,000
Consulting / strategy	R18,000

A template-based site sits below all of this, from around R6,500. That is a real option and we will tell you when it's the right one — paying R18,000 for something a template does properly is a waste of your money and our time.

What moves the number

Three things scale the base, and they are the honest drivers of cost — not padding.

How big your business is. Solo or startup lands at 0.85× the base; a small team of two to twenty at 1×; twenty-one to a hundred at 1.25×; enterprise at 1.6×. This is not a charge for having money. Larger organisations bring more stakeholders, more existing systems to integrate against, more approval steps and stricter security review. That work is real.

How big the project is. A focused starter build is 0.8×. A standard build is 1×. Advanced or multi-feature is 1.4×. A platform or ongoing engagement is 1.9×.

When you need it. Flexible timing is 0.95× — genuinely cheaper, because we can slot it around other work. One to two months is 1×. Inside a month is 1.15×. A rush is 1.35×.

That last multiplier is the one worth pausing on. Urgency is the easiest cost to avoid. If your deadline is artificial, moving it back two weeks is the cheapest discount available to you.

Add-ons, at cost

Add-on	Price
Ongoing care plan	R6,000
AI-SEO & analytics	R7,000
CMS / editable content	R9,000
Workflow automation	R14,000
E-commerce / payments	R16,000
AI assistant / chatbot	R18,000

These are added to the base before the multipliers apply, which is why a rushed enterprise build with three add-ons escalates quickly.

Four worked examples

Each of these is the wizard's own output — base plus add-ons, times the three multipliers, expressed as a range of −18% to +28% around the midpoint and rounded to the nearest R500.

A solo founder who needs a credible site they can edit themselves. Website base, solo, focused scope, flexible timing, CMS add-on. R14,500 – R22,500.

A small team automating one workflow end to end. AI integration base, small team, standard scope, one-to-two months, workflow automation add-on. R48,500 – R75,500.

A mid-size firm replacing a spreadsheet with an internal tool that answers questions. Systems base, twenty-one to a hundred staff, advanced scope, needed inside a month, AI assistant and workflow automation. R115,500 – R180,500.

A small team launching a customer-facing app with payments, on a rush. App base, small team, platform scope, rush timing, e-commerce and a care plan. R235,500 – R367,500.

Note what the fourth example demonstrates. The base is R112,000 including add-ons. The multipliers — platform scope at 1.9× and rush at 1.35× — more than double it. Scope and urgency, not the add-ons, are what make a project expensive.

Why it's a range and not a price

The band is deliberately wide because an indicative estimate that pretends to be exact is a lie you find out about later. The range narrows to a fixed figure once we understand what you actually have: your current systems, your data, who needs to approve what.

We would rather quote you honestly and lose the job than win it on a number we have to renegotiate in week three. If you have had that experience with a previous supplier, you already know what it costs.

What isn't in these numbers

Third-party costs are yours and we don't mark them up: hosting, domains, and the API or licence fees for the platforms an automation talks to. Those last ones deserve attention in South Africa specifically, because most are billed in dollars — so your monthly running cost moves with the exchange rate even when nothing about your system changes. We will tell you what to expect before you commit, and where a rand-denominated alternative exists.

Ongoing support is the care plan, priced above. Automation that nobody maintains degrades: an API changes, a credential expires, a workflow silently stops. Budgeting nothing for that is the most common way an otherwise good project quietly stops paying for itself.

Get your own number

The quote tool takes about a minute and gives you the same range this article describes, for your specific situation. Nothing is hidden behind a form you have to fill in twice.

If your situation doesn't fit the wizard's categories — and plenty don't — tell us what you're trying to fix and we'll give you a straight answer about whether it's worth building at all.