The Bot Desk
Prices checked Sep 2026

Every article

Newest first. Every price carries the date it was checked against the vendor's own page.

Risk & rules

Who Is Liable When Your Automation Makes a Mistake

Published terms from OpenAI, Zapier, Make and UiPath disclaim warranties and exclude lost profits, lost data and business…

SEP 02
9 min
Costs

How to Calculate Automation ROI Honestly

Hours saved times an hourly rate overstates automation ROI by more than two times, because it assumes full coverage, no oversight…

SEP 01
8 min
How to automate

Connecting an AI Agent to a Work Inbox Safely

The safe default is read plus drafts, with sending withheld. Microsoft 365 enforces that split at the permission level because…

AUG 29
8 min
Risk & rules

HIPAA and Automation Tools: What a BAA Really Does

You need a signed business associate agreement before an automation vendor touches protected health information, and encryption or…

AUG 28
8 min
Costs

Automate or Hire? The Break-Even Arithmetic

Using March 2026 federal employer cost data, a workflow costing about $2,600 to build and run for a year breaks even at roughly 1…

AUG 27
8 min
How to automate

Automating a Weekly Report That Fails Loudly

A scheduled report needs three parts: a job that rebuilds numbers from raw data, checks that run before the send, and a failure…

AUG 26
8 min
Risk & rules

Customer Data and AI Agents: US Rules That Apply

No single US law governs running customer data through an AI agent. What applies is a stack: FTC Act Section 5, the state privacy…

AUG 25
9 min
Comparisons

AI agent platforms compared: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google

All three sell a model that calls your tools in a loop, plus a framework to keep that loop in check. The difference that shows up…

AUG 24
8 min
How to automate

Automating New-Hire Paperwork: What Must Stay Manual

Offer letters, e-signatures, account creation and equipment requests can all run unattended from a single intake record. Form I-9…

AUG 22
8 min
Costs

Automation Free Tiers Compared, September 2026

Free tiers on the major automation platforms are sized for one or two low-frequency workflows, and the wall is usually structural…

AUG 21
8 min
Comparisons

n8n vs Make: Self-Hosted, Cloud, and the License

n8n ships under the Sustainable Use License, which is fair-code rather than OSI open source: run it for your own business, but do…

AUG 20
9 min
How to automate

How to auto-triage support tickets, and catch misses

Auto-triage makes three decisions before a human reads the ticket: topic, priority and owner. Classification is reliable enough to…

AUG 19
7 min
Risk & rules

SOC 2 Reports: What They Tell an Automation Buyer

A SOC 2 report says what one CPA firm found when it examined a vendor's controls, in a scope the vendor chose, over a window that…

AUG 18
8 min
Comparisons

What Enterprise RPA Costs, and Who Publishes Prices

Microsoft publishes a full Power Automate price list, UiPath publishes one number for a two-robot starter tier, and Automation…

AUG 17
8 min
Costs

Automation Pricing: Tasks vs Credits vs Seats

Zapier bills successful actions, Make bills every module run including trigger checks, and n8n bills whole workflow runs. The same…

AUG 16
8 min
How to automate

How to route web-form leads into a CRM automatically

Automatic lead routing needs three pieces: a form that writes straight into the CRM, a deduplication rule, and an assignment step…

AUG 15
7 min
Comparisons

Power Automate vs Zapier If You Already Pay for M365

Microsoft 365 seeds Power Automate with standard connectors and 6,000 requests per user per day, and nothing more. Premium…

AUG 13
8 min
Costs

What Workflow Automation Costs in 2026

For a five-person company running three modest automations, the software runs about $47 to $110 a month at September 2026 list…

AUG 12
9 min
How to automate

How to automate invoice data entry, end to end

Cloud document AI pulls invoice fields for about a penny a page, and the vendor docs are specific about which fields and which…

AUG 11
8 min
Comparisons

Zapier vs Make: How the Pricing Models Differ

Zapier bills successful action steps and gives the trigger away for free. Make bills every module run, trigger included, and counts…

AUG 10
8 min