We put a calculator on a developer studio's site for a reason. The problem with the usual "save 20 hours a week!" claim isn't that it's wrong — it's that it's somebody else's number. Yours is sitting in your team's calendar, and you'll believe it a lot more once you've worked it out yourself.
So this is the opposite of a sales calculator. No email gate, no "talk to us" pop-up halfway down. Put in what one task really costs and the year is right there. If it's big enough to act on, the blueprint's waiting — but you don't have to touch it.
The cost nobody puts on a spreadsheet
These tasks survive because they're not one big block of work — they're death by a thousand taps. A follow-up here, a data re-key there, a report compiled at midnight before a Monday deadline. None of it feels like much in the moment, which is exactly why it never gets prioritized.
But the real cost isn't the minutes. It's what those minutes are made of. The person doing lead follow-up is usually someone whose time is worth more than the task suggests, and every context switch back into "admin mode" costs focus you never get back. When we scope a workflow, the hours are the easy part. The expensive part is senior attention being spent on junior work.
Reading the four numbers
Four outputs, in plain terms. Saved per week is the hours you claw back immediately. Saved per year is that weekly number times your working weeks — the one to show your boss or your business partner. Saved over 3 yearsmatters because one workflow tends to lead to three, and the compound is where this gets interesting. Typical payback is a rough sense of how fast a build on this single task pays for itself.
A worked example: a nine-person agency where one person spends twelve hours a week on lead follow-up, at a blended $55 an hour. The calculator lands that at roughly $17,000 a year, recovered, before anyone works faster or smarter. That's a hire-adjacent amount of capacity from a single, unglamorous workflow — which is usually where the real money is.
Where this number lies to you
Be suspicious of your own optimistic instinct, and ours. Three honest caveats:
The 70% default is a ceiling for clean tasks and a fantasy for messy ones. If the work involves chasing people, interpreting ambiguous inputs, or deciding what "done" means, expect closer to 40–50%. The readiness checklist is the better tool for judging that up front.
The calculator also can't see quality risk. Automating a task that occasionally needs judgment will sometimes get it wrong, and you have to price in the review time. And some tasks simply shouldn't be automated — usually the ones where a mistake is expensive and rare. We'd rather tell you that than build something fragile.
What to actually do with it
If the yearly number made you wince, that's the signal. Pick the single workflow behind it and don't try to boil the ocean — one agent, running on your real work, measured against this baseline, beats a grand plan that never ships.
The free blueprint is where we map that workflow properly: the actual savings, the right framework, and an honest call on whether automation is even worth it here. No invoice to start, and a plain no if it isn't.