Every SME that decides to automate faces the same three doors: hire someone who can do it, subscribe to software that promises it, or bring in an agency. Vendors of each door will tell you the other two are mistakes. Here is the version without the sales agenda, including the cases where our own door is the wrong one.
Door one: hire your own automation person
The market reality first. IT and data freelancers in the German-speaking region bill a median of roughly 95 to 104 euros per hour (Freelancer-Kompass survey), which prices a competent freelancer at 700 to 1,200 euros per day. A permanent hire with AI and integration skills lands, fully loaded with employer costs, well into six figures a year in most DACH markets, assuming you can find one: these profiles are exactly what every company is hunting right now.
What the hire buys you that nothing else does: the knowledge stays in the house, compounds over years, and is there the morning something breaks. If automation is going to be core to how your company competes, this is eventually the right answer.
What it quietly assumes: that you have enough continuous automation work to fill a position, that someone in your company can manage and evaluate a role nobody there has held before, and that your business survives the day this one person resigns. For a 15-person company automating three processes, all three assumptions are usually false.
Door two: subscribe to a SaaS tool
The software itself has become genuinely cheap. Intake assistants for law firms start at around 59 to 99 euros per user per month, AI chatbot platforms at 50 to 500 euros per month, voice agents at cents per minute. For a single, well-bounded problem that a product was purpose-built for, this is unbeatable value, and we regularly point intro-call prospects at exactly such products.
What it quietly assumes: that your problem matches what the product does out of the box, that someone in your team will configure it, connect it to your systems, keep it tuned and own it when it misbehaves, and that your process fits the tool rather than the other way around. The subscription is cheap; the internal time is the real price, and it is the line item nobody budgets. Most SaaS automation that fails does not fail loudly. It just quietly stops being used by March.
Door three: an agency
An agency sells you the outcome instead of the ingredients: someone else scopes the process, builds the integration, trains your team and carries the risk of the estimate, ideally at a fixed price. You pay more than a subscription and less than a salary, one project at a time.
What it quietly assumes: that the agency scopes honestly instead of selling you a platform, that what they build is documented and maintainable by others (ask what happens if you leave them), and that they stay reachable after go-live. These assumptions fail often enough that they are the right due-diligence questions for any agency, including us.
The honest decision rules
- One bounded problem with a purpose-built product available: take the SaaS tool. A solo lawyer who needs phone intake should subscribe to a phone-intake product, not commission a custom build.
- Automation is becoming your competitive core and you have years of continuous work: start building toward a hire. An agency can bridge and set standards until you find the person.
- A handful of processes, systems that need connecting, no one internal to own the build: that is the agency case. It is also, in fairness, our case, so weigh this paragraph accordingly and check it against the two assumptions above.
- Mixed reality, which is most companies: a tool where a tool fits, an agency where integration is the problem, and a hire when the automation portfolio has grown large enough to justify one. The doors are not exclusive.
We published what each path costs in detail, with sources, in our pricing overview. And if you want the decision checked against your specific situation: about a third of our intro calls end with the advice to take one of the other two doors. That statistic is the most useful thing we can tell you about how we run them.