Before you pay for any tool, see what it could actually be worth. Estimate the hours — and the money — an AI or automation tool could buy back for your team every month.
This is an honest estimate, not a promise — your real return depends on the tool, your workflow and how well you implement it. We deliberately let you set the automation rate yourself rather than assume it. Adjust the sliders to match your reality.
The math is simple and on purpose: hours your team spends on a repetitive task × the share a tool can realistically automate gives you the time bought back, and multiplying by your hourly cost turns that into euros. The point isn't a precise figure — it's to see whether a tool's monthly price is dwarfed by the time it frees up. For most lean teams, if a tool buys back even a few hours a week, it pays for itself many times over.
Every recommendation on AIBuilder Marketplace is written by a founder who runs his own businesses on these tools — honest pros, cons and verdicts, in English.
Everything downstream of that field is arithmetic; the field itself is a judgement. Using a salary divided by 2,080 hours understates the real number, because an hour of someone’s time costs employer taxes, benefits, software, desk and management attention on top of pay. Loaded cost is commonly a third to a half above salary. Use the low figure and every tool looks marginal; use a defensible loaded rate and the picture changes without anything else moving. If the hour belongs to a founder, the honest rate is what you would otherwise be doing with it, which is usually higher still.
“This tool automates 80% of the task” almost never means 80% of the time disappears. What usually goes is the routine middle, while the setup, the judgement calls and the exceptions stay with a person — and exceptions are the slow part. A safer method is to think in cases rather than percentages: of ten typical instances of this task, how many would run end to end without anyone touching them? That number is usually lower than the marketing figure and much closer to what you will see in month two.
A return multiple flatters everything: any tool that saves a few hours a month looks spectacular against a $30 subscription. Payback period asks a harder question — how long until the time saved has covered the cost, including the hours spent implementing it. A tool that pays back in three weeks is worth trying on the strength of the estimate alone. One that pays back in eight months needs the estimate to be right, and estimates about your own future behaviour usually are not.
The calculation converts hours into currency, which is a useful shorthand and a slightly optimistic one. Freeing four hours a week only produces value if those hours move to something that matters; if they spread themselves thinly across the day, the money was real and the return was not. Before you buy, decide what the reclaimed time is for. That single sentence is a better predictor of whether a tool pays off than any figure this page produces.
The calculator assumes a fixed monthly cost, which holds for seat-based tools and not for metered ones. A growing share of AI tooling prices by consumption: Ava AI sells $29, $99 and $499 tiers that are really allowances of call minutes, with overage at $0.07 to $0.10 per minute beyond them, and Aircall’s AI voice runs from $0.19 a minute on top of the licence. With those, cost rises alongside the very usage that produces the saving. Model the volume you expect rather than the tier price, and check what the bill looks like at twice that volume.
Some of the strongest reasons to buy software do not appear here. Fewer errors in work that is expensive to get wrong. Being able to answer a customer at midnight. Removing the task that makes someone want to quit. Those are real returns and none of them are hours × rate. Equally, some costs are missing: the learning curve, the integration that breaks, the migration if you leave in a year. Use the figure as one input into a decision, not as the decision.
Estimates tend to compare the tool against doing the task entirely by hand, when the real alternative is a cheaper tool, an existing tool you already pay for, or a small process change. Before committing, check whether something in your stack already does eighty per cent of this — our stack auditor is built for that question, and it is the cheapest possible way to improve your ROI, because the licence you do not buy returns infinitely.
For an employee, take salary, add roughly a third for employer costs and overhead, then divide by realistic working hours rather than contracted ones. For your own time, use what you would earn doing the most valuable thing you are not currently doing. Both are estimates; the point is to be consistent across the tools you compare.
It is a reason to trial. The figure rests on your estimate of how much of the task really automates, and that estimate only becomes evidence once the tool is in your hands. Most vendors offer a trial precisely because that is the cheapest way to replace an assumption with a measurement.
No. The calculation runs in your browser and we never receive your figures.
Because the right tool depends on the task, not on the return. Once you know what the time is worth, the tool finder narrows the category and our reviews cover what each option is genuinely good and bad at — including whether the price you will pay is the one on the pricing page.
New tools, real comparisons and the workflows that actually save hours. No spam.