Q&A with ThinkAutomation: Automating Your Entire Tech Stack Without Paying Per Process, Licence, or “Robot”

By Community Team

Today’s mainstream process automation model is broken. Simply, businesses are being overcharged for automating routine manual processes. And this overcharge is particularly true when the needed process automation involves a heavy volume of data, or a diverse mix of integrations and workflows.

But what drives this mass overspend on automation? We spoke to Howard Williams, Commercial Director at ThinkAutomation, on the automation pricing model – and how to automate your entire tech stack without forking out the usual three-figure sums.

You say the automation pricing model is broken. What do you mean by that?

First, it’s important to establish that there are two core branches of process automation. Businesses will generally use either RPA or BPA to handle their automatable manual processes. (That’s robotic process automation and business process automation, respectively.)

So, what’s the difference? Simply, RPA works on the interface level whereas BPA works in the back-end of systems.

With RPA, you’re getting ‘bots’ or ‘virtual assistants’ (or whatever the vendor’s preferred terminology might be) that can interact with a machine in a similar fashion to a human employee. Think scrolls and clicks – things that happen using a GUI. Those bots can ‘learn’ by monitoring employee actions and replicating them.

With BPA, there is no such ‘learning’. Rather, you build automations by dragging and dropping various if blocks and conditional actions. Or you can write your own custom scripts if needed. This requires a series of back-end integrations to execute the desired actions in the desired programs. So, the BPA approach can be a little clunkier than interface-level access, and requires rule-based logic.

And it’s the configuration difference between the two main branches of process automation that has led to a broken pricing model. Hype around ‘software bots’ has made RPA something of a must-have technology trend.

Now, a handful of RPA providers dominate the process automation space. Which, in turn, comes at a price markup for the average company looking to digitally transform by automating their labour-intensive administrative processes.

Okay, let’s get into the details. What kind of price markup are you talking about?

Often, the kind of price markup we’re talking about between an RPA and a BPA deployment is the difference of tens – even hundreds – of thousands of pounds.

It’s difficult to put a figure on exact numbers, as RPA pricing is shrouded in secrecy. Vendors guard their prices carefully, and you’ll need to speak to a salesperson or a channel partner before you can get a ballpark figure. And that ballpark figure will also be subject to reseller deals, volumes, licences, hosting, and so on.

For example, you need to pay per licence depending on what you’d like to automate, and across how many areas. You’ll need different ‘orchestrator’ licences, ‘studio’ licences, licences for ‘attended’ bots, licences for ‘unattended’ bots, etc. All of which may be priced wildly differently.

Then there are charges based on how much data you need to process – particularly when that data is processed via cloud systems in your tech stack.  And of course, pricing will also fluctuate based on whether you want to implement locally or as a cloud-hosted service.

What this all means is that a fixed, transparent pricing model isn’t publicly available for RPA solutions. Indeed, some users even report signing an NDA around their pricing agreements. So, it’s devilishly tricky to know whether the price you’re paying is fair, or competitive, until you’re already deep down the purchase funnel.

This, ultimately, is why the model is broken, and what drives companies to pay far too much for their process automation.

Can you give a rough price comparison to demonstrate the overspend?

Let’s look at some estimations. For RPA, on average, you’re looking at £10k per year, per licence. (A licence referring to a single RPA unit or ‘bot’ if you will.) So, your absolute minimum spend is £10,000 a year to automate what will be a reined-in field of processes with that single licence only.

But there’s more to the price picture than licence fees. RPA deployments typically involve high one-time costs – things like consultations and training and deployment support, for instance. These one-time costs are estimated at some £100,000. This, then, is why the total cost of a standard RPA implementation is priced up at an eye-watering £206,180 per year.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that these prices can (and will) increase for enterprises with constant, heavy loads of data to process.  For example, an enterprise corporation would need to spend an estimated $20 million on some 500 bot licences to automate at the required scale.

So, you’re looking at a bare minimum of £10k per year, all the way up to millions, for an RPA deployment. And the plain truth is that businesses could be automating the exact same complex processes, achieving the exact same results, for a fraction of the cost. That is, if they use a BPA solution like ThinkAutomation.

The results are the same, even with the core differences between RPA and BPA?

Yes. Simply, you’re automating the same actions, just in a different way. Indeed, from a results perspective, RPA offers nothing intrinsically new – and nothing that BPA hasn’t already been offering for decades.

Invariably, businesses are looking to automate their routine, manual administration. And, despite differences in systems and processes, this administration remains similar in most office environments.

Think things such as copy-pasting data from system A to system B. Processing and generating invoices. Parsing and sorting emails. Updating databases and CRMs. Handling tickets.

Managing files. Sending triggered emails. Essentially, all manner of transforming, extracting, uploading and updating data across your tech stack.

These are the routine, resource-draining tasks that the vast majority of companies are looking to automate. And, when it comes down to it, these kinds of tasks don’t require a horde of artificial software assistants to do so, charged at £10k per unit. BPA is more than capable of handling those processes smoothly – and substantially more cost-effectively.

To strip things down to their most practical level, automating workflows is all based on rule-based actions – even if you’re using bots rather than conventional conditional programming.

So, with either RPA or BPA, you’re automating similar tasks. You’re using a dedicated, low-code automation studio, with additional scripting options if needed. You’re getting the same end results.

If the post-configuration yields of automation are so similar, does it really matter how you get there? Do you really want to pay tens of thousands, when you could pay a fraction of that?

You talk about how ThinkAutomation comes in at a fraction of the cost of RPA platforms. Can you tell us more about the product?

ThinkAutomation is an on-premises automation platform designed for open-ended orchestration, at any volume, to handle any conceivable process. It comprises:

  • A powerful automation studio

Where workflow orchestration takes place. The studio offers an accessible drag-and-drop GUI, with a vast library of native integrations and actions.

  • An integrated development environment

Where you can design your own actions and build your own connectors via C# or VB.NET scripts. It also allows pasting directly from Visual Studio and referencing external assemblies.

  • A hybrid automation gateway

The gateway allows you to connect into any API. It enables the use of on-premises data in cloud services (and vice versa), with cost-effective local processing.

This setup provides a truly open-ended scale. You can automate any process, in any application, on any scale required. All under a single licence, for one set cost.

And what does this one set cost look like?

The ThinkAutomation standard edition costs £999 per year. And for that, you get to build out any number of workflows, at any complexity and process as much data as you like. Compare that to the £10k price tag for a single RPA unit, handling a single area.

Our price structures are as follows:

  • Standard 

Unlimited access to the ThinkAutomation studio, plus unlimited processing / workflow builds.

£999 per year

  • Professional 

Everything in the Standard edition, plus the integrated development environment for custom actions / scripts.

£1999 per year

  • Enterprise

Everything in the Pro edition, plus access to technicians and options for extras such as failover and professional services.

Quote

  • Developer 

For developers / resellers looking to test and deploy for their own customers. Everything in the Professional edition, but with a limit of 200 processed messages per day. 

Free

  • Evaluation

The trial version, which is free and operates for 30 days. Includes everything in the Professional edition.

Free

In the words of software reviewer Bill Kindle: “Going from nothing to building an automation solution that works makes the ThinkAutomation pricing not only affordable but a no-brainer.”

Simply, if you’re spending tens or hundreds of thousands per year on process automation, you’re spending vastly more than you need to. So, why not download ThinkAutomation for a free 30-day evaluation and automate your entire tech stack without paying per process, licence, or “robot”?

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