What one digital employee costs in its first year
A pilot costs 3,000 euro to build and 850 a month to run. That is 13,200 in the first year and 10,200 in every year after, plus hosting and model usage at cost. An employee on 3,000 gross a month costs 59,444 in year one.
What is in the setup fee?
Mapping the workflow, designing the role, building it, connecting it and putting it live.
The mapping is the part people underestimate and the part that decides whether the rest works. It is where the exceptions surface. Exceptions separate a workflow you can hand over from one you cannot.
A pilot covers one digital employee on one scoped workflow, with integration into up to three tools. Timeline is two to four weeks, six at the outside.
What is in the monthly fee?
Monitoring, handling the edge cases, and continuous optimisation.
Edge cases are not a footnote. A workflow that ran cleanly in week one meets its first new situation in month two. Someone has to decide what the right behaviour is.
Optimisation is the same story. The first version is a good guess at where the boundary between machine and person sits. The boundary moves once you have run it.
What sits outside the price?
Hosting and AI usage, passed through at cost.
We keep those separate on purpose. You see what the infrastructure and the models charge, not a margin on top. The amounts are small next to the fee, and they scale with volume rather than with time.
Exact scope and price are confirmed after the workflow mapping, before you commit to anything.
How does that compare to a hire?
An employee on 3,000 euro gross a month costs 59,444 in year one. That is 4,954 a month.
The build-up is 36,000 in salary and 2,880 holiday pay. Then roughly 11,664 in employer contributions, 5,000 to recruit and 3,900 to get up to speed. A pilot over the same year is 13,200, which is 1,100 a month.
Both columns are money leaving your account, not value coming back. They are worth redoing with your own payroll numbers, because yours will differ.
How does it compare to giving the team AI tools?
Five seats of a subscription runs to 1,200 a year. The hours are the expensive part.
Somebody has to sit with those tools, phrase the request, check the output and paste the result back. At three hours a week that is 11,700 a year in time, which brings the total to 12,900. Almost the same money as a pilot.
The difference is not the price. The seats need a person driving them. A digital employee runs the workflow whether or not anyone opens it.
When is it not worth it?
When the workflow runs a handful of times a month, or when every case turns out to be different.
The arithmetic only works on volume and repetition. Ten cases a month will not pay back a build, however annoying those ten cases are.
It is also not worth it if nobody owns the result. Work that is handed over and never looked at drifts. Drift costs more than the manual version did.
Source: the arithmetic on the AImplement pricing page, using Dutch employer contributions and public averages for recruitment and onboarding. Prices exclude VAT.