The calculator above gives you a rough number on hours and AUD value saved per year. Use it as a sanity check before committing to an AI build.

How to read the inputs

Hours per week on the task, be honest. Most owners undercount because they spread the work across many small sessions.
Hourly cost, what you’d pay someone else to do this (VA rate, your own opportunity cost, contractor rate). $50-100 AUD for VA work; $100-200 for skilled ops; $150-250 for your own time.
% the AI can take over, 70% is a reasonable default for structured admin. Bump to 85% for very narrow workflows (data entry, format conversion). Drop to 40-50% for judgment-heavy work (client comms, decisions).
Weeks per year, most businesses work 48 weeks. Adjust for your reality.

What the calculator doesn’t include

Build cost. A typical first AI workflow costs $497-3,000 AUD to build properly. Subtract this from your year-one value.
Maintenance cost. Roughly 10-20% of the build cost per year for tweaks and updates.
Tooling. Claude API + any new SaaS. Typically $30-150 AUD/month.
The compound effect. Workflows built well in year 1 usually expand in year 2. The value calculation here is conservative.

Under $5,000 AUD/year, probably not worth a custom build. Use existing SaaS (Zapier, Notion AI, etc) or stick with manual.
$5,000 - $15,000 AUD/year, worth the build, especially if there are 2-3 similar workflows you could batch.
$15,000+ AUD/year, almost always worth building. ROI hits in months, not years.
$50,000+ AUD/year, strongly indicates you should have built this 6 months ago.

If you’d like us to scope a specific workflow against this calculator, that’s literally the first half of a free audit.