The Compliance Cost Institute

AI Automation Build vs Buy TCO Calculator

Compare 3-year TCO for building custom AI automation vs enterprise platforms. Includes risk premiums, on-call costs, and failure impact.

Step 1 of 425% complete

Build Scenario

How many engineers would work on the custom automation build?

Full-time equivalent engineers dedicated to building and maintaining the automation solution

1315

What is the fully-loaded hourly engineering cost?

Include salary, benefits, taxes, equipment, and overhead divided by productive hours

$50$175$350

How many months to build the initial automation MVP?

Time from project start to production-ready deployment

1 mo6 mo18 mo

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