Why we are different
We built the engines. That is the whole reason this is affordable.
Most suppliers in this market resell somebody else’s automation platform and somebody else’s document reader, then add their margin on top. Every one of those licences has a floor, and the floor sets their minimum price. We have neither, so our first engagement can cost fifteen thousand pounds instead of a hundred and fifty.
The arithmetic
Why nobody else can meet you at this price
This is not a discount or an introductory offer. It is a different cost structure, and it is the reason our pilot fits inside a direct award while theirs needs a business case.
| Supplier type | What sets their floor | What that means for a first engagement |
|---|---|---|
| Large consultancies | Day rates. A six-week discovery is six weeks of consultant days however it is packaged. | A first engagement rarely starts below six figures, which means a full business case and a procurement cycle before anything happens. |
| Generic automation vendors | Platform licensing, charged per machine per year, before a single process is automated. | The licence alone consumes most of a small pilot budget, so small pilots are not offered. |
| Specialist automation shops | Every engagement is built from scratch for that trust. | The build effort cannot be recovered from a small first engagement, so the first engagement is not small. |
| weAutomate | Our own engines and a pre-built stack that is configured rather than constructed. | A first engagement is small enough for one person to approve, and the work still gets done properly. |
What owning the stack actually buys you
Four consequences, all of which show up in your contract
No per-page reading fee
Commercial document-reading services charge by the page. At archive scale that is the dominant cost of the entire programme — enough, on a multi-million-page estate, to exceed the budget on its own. Our marginal cost is compute time, which is a different order of magnitude. It is the reason we can talk about clearing an archive in months rather than years.
No platform licence per machine
Automation platforms charge annually per machine, whether the machine is busy or idle. Scaling means buying more licences before you have proved the value. We add capacity by adding capacity.
Safety built in, not bolted on
Because we wrote both engines, the checks live inside them. A bot cannot perform an action outside what it was configured to do — not because a rule forbids it, but because there is no path to it. Suppliers assembling third-party tools can add supervision around the edges; they cannot change what the tool does when it is unsure.
Every engagement improves the next
Document shapes, letterheads and validation rules learned at one organisation carry to the next. A supplier billing per build has the opposite incentive — sharing what they learned would reduce what they can charge for the next one.
The honest limits
What that trade-off costs you
Owning the stack is not free of downsides, and you should hear them from us rather than from a competitor.
We are a smaller supplier
We do not have a thousand consultants to surge onto a programme. We take on work we can deliver and decline work we cannot.
Our stack is not a household name
Nobody was ever criticised for buying the market leader. If your organisation needs a familiar logo on the paperwork more than it needs the outcome, we are the wrong choice.
Some things are genuinely not built
A pre-built stack covers what it covers. Where your requirement falls outside it we will say so at the first meeting rather than discovering it at week ten.
The test is a small one, on purpose
You do not have to believe any of this. Take the smallest engagement we offer, on your own data, and judge it on what comes back.