Part Four

The math.

Cost side (Anthropic + workflow runtime + hosting for a 15-person services firm running ~10 active workflows):

• Anthropic API total: $30-80/mo
• Self-hosted workflow orchestration (n8n on a $6/mo Hetzner box): $6/mo
• LiteLLM gateway (free, self-hosted): $0
• LangFuse observability (free tier): $0

Total incremental cost: under $90/month.

Time saved side (same firm, same 10 workflows):

• Bookkeeping cleanup: 6 hrs/week saved
• Customer support triage: 8 hrs/week saved for a 3-agent team
• Lead capture + follow-up: 3 hrs/week saved
• Appointment reminders + no-show reduction: 40% no-show reduction (industry norm)
• Meeting notes + CRM update: 4 hrs/week saved
• Weekly financial digest: 2 hrs/week saved
• Social + content cross-posting: 3 hrs/week saved

Total time saved: roughly 25 hours/week.

If those hours were staffed by a VA at $25/hr, that’s $2,500/mo. If they were staffed by a bookkeeper at $75/hr, that’s $7,500/mo. The savings are real, and they are largely unaffected by whether you’re running Haiku or Sonnet under the hood, because you’re routing by task type.

The correct framing is not “AI is cheap” or “AI is expensive.” The correct framing is: for the specific workflows above, agents cost about 3% of the equivalent human labor at 25-hour-per-week volumes.

The crossover happens at 100 tasks/month for most workflows. Every workflow above that volume is agent-cheap.