We are unusually transparent about this because most vendors in our space are not. The ongoing cost of running a digital employee is real, and you should understand it before you commit.
There are two components: infrastructure and AI model usage.
Infrastructure costs.
Your digital employee runs on your server. If you already have a server or cloud instance for your business systems, the digital employee typically adds minimal overhead. Most of what it does is lightweight: reading email, writing to a database, calling APIs. The compute requirements are not large.
If you are starting from scratch, a small cloud instance — a single-CPU virtual machine with 2 to 4GB of memory — costs between £10 and £40 per month depending on the provider and region. That is the floor for a single digital employee doing moderate volume work.
For a busy team with multiple digital employees running simultaneously, you might be looking at £80 to £200 per month in infrastructure. Still a fraction of a single staff member.
AI model costs.
This is the more variable component. Every time a digital employee calls an AI model — to read a document, draft a reply, extract data, or make a decision — it incurs a small cost. That cost is measured in tokens, which you can roughly think of as words.
To give you a concrete sense of the numbers:
- Processing one supplier invoice: approximately £0.01 to £0.03
- Drafting a client email from a brief: approximately £0.02 to £0.05
- Summarising a one-hour meeting transcript: approximately £0.08 to £0.15
- Running a weekly business summary: approximately £0.10 to £0.20
A typical small business using The Accountant plus The Useful Employee at moderate volume might spend £15 to £40 per month on model API costs. A heavier use case, or a Sales Guy running active outreach, might reach £80 to £150.
These numbers will go down over time. AI model costs have dropped by roughly 90 percent in the last two years, and the trend continues.
The comparison that matters.
A junior staff member in the UK costs £25,000 to £35,000 per year in salary, before National Insurance, pension contributions, holiday pay, sick leave, and management overhead. All-in cost is typically £35,000 to £50,000 per year.
A digital employee doing comparable volume of work costs £500 to £2,500 per year in running costs, on top of the one-time build fee.
The comparison is not "digital employee vs software subscription." It is "digital employee vs person."
That is the frame that changes the calculation. A SaaS tool might charge £200 to £500 per month for a single-function product. A digital employee costs less to run and does more.
What the one-time fee covers.
The build fee is not a licence. It is the cost of designing, building, testing, and deploying a system that is specific to your business. Once paid, you own it. You own the code, the integrations, the data, and the logic. There is no monthly licence, no per-seat pricing, no vendor who can change the terms in six months.
The optional Annual Maintenance Contract covers ongoing updates, model upgrades as better versions ship, and any repairs that come from changes in your business environment. It is modest, and optional.
The short version.
Build once. Run for less than £200 per month in most cases. Own it forever. Add more as your business needs grow.
That is the model. We think it is the right one.
