What Automation Costs a 20-50 Person Company
A 20 to 50 person company should budget roughly $140 to $270 a month in automation software across the three stacks priced here, plus an unpublished volume uplift if you go per-task, and 6 to 12 hours of staff time, worth $240 to $481 at the March 2026 BLS estimate for employers of this size. Seats and per-bot licences, not task volume, drive the bill.
A 20 to 50 person company running a real automation portfolio should budget roughly $140 to $270 a month in software across the three stacks priced below, plus an unpublished volume uplift if you go per-task, and 6 to 12 hours a month of someone's time, which at the March 2026 BLS estimate for employers of this size is another $240 to $481. Total: about $380 to $750 a month before that uplift. The software is the smaller half, and the line that surprises people is not the platform — it is the seats and the per-bot licences attached to it.
Every price below was checked against the vendor's own page in September 2026, and the arithmetic is shown so you can substitute your own volumes.
Why a 30-person company is not six times a 5-person company
Our worked budget for a five-person company came to roughly $47 to $110 a month in software plus four hours of maintenance (what workflow automation costs). Scaling that by headcount would predict about $600 in software. It does not work that way, because three new cost axes appear at this size and none of them is task volume.
- Seats. At five people, one builder is enough and most plans include the rest. At thirty, several departments want to build, and some platforms charge per person.
- Premium connectors. The systems a 30-person company runs on — an ERP, a database, an on-premises file share — sit behind the premium tier on Microsoft's platform and the premium app list on Zapier's.
- Per-bot licences. Once anything has to click through a desktop application without a human present, you are buying a robot licence, priced per bot per month regardless of how much it runs.
The workload, counted before it is priced
Take six automations a 30-person company plausibly runs, and count billable units. Remember that the platforms count different things: Zapier bills only successful action steps, with triggers, filters, paths and formatting free; Make counts each module run, including the trigger; n8n counts one whole workflow execution regardless of step count.
| Workflow | Runs/month | Zapier tasks | Make credits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lead intake to CRM | 1,200 | 1,200 × 4 = 4,800 | 1,200 × 5 = 6,000 |
| Daily AR nudges (60 invoices) | 22 | 22 × 60 × 2 = 2,640 | 22 × 121 = 2,662 |
| Support ticket triage | 900 | 900 × 3 = 2,700 | 900 × 4 = 3,600 |
| New-hire paperwork | 4 | 4 × 8 = 32 | 4 × 9 = 36 |
| Weekly reports, 3 departments | 12 | 12 × 6 = 72 | 12 × 7 = 84 |
| Order and fulfillment sync | 2,000 | 2,000 × 2 = 4,000 | 2,000 × 3 = 6,000 |
| Monthly total | 14,244 tasks | 18,382 credits |
Roughly 14,000 tasks or 18,000 credits a month. That matters, because it is well past the entry allowance on both platforms, and here is the honest problem with pricing it.
Neither Zapier nor Make prints the price of the volume tier you would actually buy as static text, but Zapier's is readable if you drive the page. Zapier shows "Starting from $69/month" for Team and an interactive task selector running to 2M tasks a month; stepped through in a browser on 4 September 2026 it gives Team, billed annually, at $69 for 2,000 tasks, $169 for 10,000, $399 for 50,000, $599 for 100,000, $2,499 for 1M and $3,999 for 2M, with the monthly-billed column exactly 50% higher at every one of those tiers. The full ladder for both plans is in what workflow automation costs. Make's page shows the selector steps — 10k, 20k, 40k, 80k, 150k and upward — but publishes a price only for the 10,000-credit base. Ask for the number at your measured volume in writing before you commit. Checked September 2026: Zapier pricing, Make pricing.
Published list prices, September 2026
| Product | Price | Unit | Users included |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zapier Professional | From $19.99/mo | Per account, by task tier | 1 |
| Zapier Team | From $69/mo | Per account, by task tier | 25 |
| Make Pro | $21/mo billed monthly | Per org, by credit tier | Unlimited |
| Make Teams | $38/mo billed monthly | Per org, by credit tier | Unlimited |
| Power Automate Premium | $15.00 user/month, paid yearly | Per user | 1 per licence |
| Power Automate Process | $150.00 bot/month, paid yearly | Per bot | Unattended, unlimited users |
| Power Automate Hosted Process | $215.00 bot/month, paid yearly | Per bot, Microsoft-hosted VM | Unattended |
| UiPath Basic | Starting at $25/month | Per tenant | Up to 5 Basic, 5 Plus and 1 Pro user; 2 unattended robots |
Sources: Zapier, Make, Microsoft Power Automate pricing, UiPath pricing, all checked September 2026. UiPath publishes a price for Basic only; Standard and Enterprise are listed as contact sales, and the page notes that users and robots may require additional licence purchases.
The premium connector trap
The most common mid-size budgeting error is assuming Microsoft 365 already includes what you need. It does not. Microsoft's own licensing documentation states that "the capabilities of Dataverse included with select Microsoft 365 licenses don't allow customers to create custom apps with Power Apps or use the premium connectors with Power Automate," and its table shows premium and custom connectors, plus on-premises data access, as unavailable on Microsoft 365 seeded licences (Microsoft Learn, checked September 2026).
Power Automate Premium at $15.00 per user per month is the entitlement that unlocks premium and custom connectors, attended desktop flows and managed environments. If you connect anything that is not a standard Microsoft or mainstream SaaS connector, that $15 is not optional — it is the price of the integration.
Nobody buys a premium connector. They buy a seat that happens to include one, for everyone who touches the flow.
Three budgets for the same company
Assume 30 people, eight of whom build or own automations, and one process that must run unattended on a desktop application at night.
| Stack | Software line | Monthly software |
|---|---|---|
| Per-task, non-Microsoft | Zapier Team $69 base, priced at ~14,000 tasks (quote required) | $69 + tier uplift |
| Microsoft shop | 8 × $15 Premium = $120, plus one Process bot at $150 | $270 |
| Mixed | 8 × $15 Premium = $120, plus Zapier Professional at $19.99 for SaaS-only glue | $139.99 |
Now the labour line. Use $40.07 per hour worked — total employer compensation cost in private establishments with 50 to 99 workers, March 2026 (BLS, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, Table 6). That band, not the $46.60 all-industry average, which is weighted upward by very large employers with richer benefit loads.
- 6 hours a month: $240.42
- 8 hours a month: $320.56
- 12 hours a month: $480.84
Microsoft shop, all in: $270 software + $320.56 labour = $590.56 a month. Against the five-person case, that is roughly two to three times the cost for six times the headcount. Automation budgets grow sublinearly with people — and linearly with seats.
Where the curve bends
Three break-even points decide which pricing model is cheaper, and all three are simple division.
Bend one: five builders. Zapier Team's entry price of $69 divided by Power Automate's $15 per user is 4.6. Above five people who need to build, a flat per-account plan is cheaper than per-seat licensing — at base volumes. Make Teams at $38 crosses even earlier, at 2.5 users. At 25 users, Zapier Team's entry price works out to $2.76 per person per month.
Bend two: volume. Per-seat pricing does not move when your workflows run more often. Per-task pricing does. The comparison is: quoted tier price versus seats × $15. Eight Premium seats cost $120 a month no matter whether your flows run 14,000 times or 140,000 times. If the quote for your task tier exceeds $120, the seat model has won on price — which is why you must get that quote before choosing.
Bend three: the 26th user. Zapier Team includes 25 users. A 30-person company that eventually gives everyone access runs off the end of the published price ladder and into Enterprise, which is quoted, not listed. For companies in the 20 to 50 band this is the bend most likely to be hit by accident, usually a year after the platform was chosen.
The robot is priced on a different axis entirely
An unattended bot is not a seat and not a task. Power Automate Process is $150.00 per bot per month paid yearly; the hosted variant, which includes a Microsoft-managed virtual machine, is $215.00. At $40.07 an hour, a $150 bot has to save 3.7 hours of work a month to break even, and the hosted one 5.4 hours.
That is a low bar for a genuinely repetitive nightly process and an impossible one for something that runs twice a month. Before buying a bot licence, count the hours it removes, not the tasks it performs. The method is in how to calculate automation ROI.
What to do with this
- Count your billable units first, from real run frequencies. The workload table above is the format.
- Count the people who genuinely need to build, not the people who will use the results. That number drives the seat line.
- List every system you must connect and check which sit behind a premium tier. Price the seat that unlocks them.
- Get written quotes for the volume tiers, because neither Zapier nor Make publishes them as text.
- Add the labour line at $40.07 an hour and put it in the budget where finance can see it.
The software is predictable once you have counted properly. It is the uncounted seats, the connector tier discovered in week three, and the hours nobody assigned that turn a $270 budget into a $600 one.