Build

Build cost

Build effort at the effective hourly rate, plus build tokens — the one-time cost of standing the suite up, landing in year one.

Unit: money, one-time
Where you enter it: Computed; shown on the Build and Total Cost tabs.

What it means

Build effort converted to money at the effective hourly rate, plus the cost of any tokens consumed during authoring. It is paid once and appears in full in the year-one total; it does not recur.

On the All Apps view it is summed across applications; on a per-app tab it is that application's own figure.

Why it matters to the cost

This is the investment side of every payback calculation. The ROI report compares each automation vendor's build cost against the annual savings it produces; a lower build cost pays back sooner, and a higher one has to be earned back by lower running costs. For the default scenario the spread between categories is roughly $10,000 to over $80,000.

Typical values

For a 300-case suite at $120,000 per FTE: roughly $8,000–$12,000 for AI-native tools, $20,000–$50,000 for codeless and script-based tools, $80,000 or more for a homegrown framework.

Typical values describe a category of tool — AI-native, codeless, script-based, homegrown, manual — never a named product. Why we do not price named products.