Start with a free 45-minute mapping session. A Stackbone engineer sits with you, sees where the time actually goes, and hands you your automation map: which processes should be running themselves, what each one is worth, and what to fix first. The map is yours to keep, whether you build with us or not.
Free. 45 minutes. You talk to the engineer, not a salesperson.
Delivered within 24 hours of the session.
This is the calculator that comes with your first automation.
Your operations manager spends Monday morning moving numbers between two systems that do not talk to each other. Your accounts-payable team keys in every vendor invoice by hand, because a third of them arrive as PDFs and photos. Your support team answers the same forty questions every week. You already know where the time goes. What nobody has told you is which one to fix first, what fixing it costs, and what it gives back.
A Stackbone engineer sits with you and asks how the work actually gets done, not how the org chart says it does. Within 24 hours you get your automation map:
The work is split into milestones with acceptance criteria written down before anything starts. You do not pay for a milestone until it passes its criteria. Nothing touches a customer until it has run in shadow mode first.
The automation is monitored and re-tested continuously, and you get a live calculator tracking what it returns each month. Then we train your team to build the second one without us.
45 minutes. No card, no commitment, no obligation to continue.
Free
Fixed, agreed in writing before kickoff, invoiced in milestones you approve.
From $6,000
Monitoring, re-testing on every model change, the return calculator, and fixing it when it breaks.
$450 / month
Building the automation is the part everyone sells. Running it for years — knowing what it did, proving it, and catching it when it drifts — is the part almost nobody does.
You can go back to any day and see exactly what the automation did, what it cost you, and how much it saved you.
Every run is persisted with its inputs, outputs, tool calls, latency and cost. Queryable and exportable.
Models change every few months. This is how you find out your automation got worse before your customers do.
An eval suite runs on every code change and against every new model release, scoring pass rate, cost, latency and quality per case.
Your data never leaves your perimeter, and no vendor can corner you on price.
The runtime executes in your own cloud account, or locally on your own hardware. Model, database and cloud are declared, not hard-wired, and swap without touching workflow code.
| Criterion | Stackbone | An agency | Your own developer | Zapier, n8n or Make |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who builds and maintains it | We do | They do | Your developer | Somebody still has to— your developer or an agency |
| Cost of the first automation | From $6,000, then $450 / mo | $30,000+ | Salary, plus months | $20–100 / mo in licences,plus whoever builds it |
| Time until it is live | 3 weeks | 2–4 months | Open-ended | Days, for simple rule-based flows |
| You own the code | Varies | lives in their tool | ||
| Handles messy input — an invoice as a photo, a ticket in Spanish | Partly, with AI add-ons | |||
| Runs on your own infrastructure, or locally | Sometimes | |||
| Swap cloud, database or model without a rebuild | Depends how it was built | |||
| Every run logged, replayable and auditable | They would build it | Basic run history | ||
| Automated evals when the model changes | They would build it | |||
| One place to govern many automations | Per-workflow only | |||
| Somebody maintains it when it breaks | On retainer | Your developer | You | |
| You can build the next one yourself | we train you |
We started Stackbone because most “AI” projects at companies like yours end the same way: a demo that impressed everyone, and a system nobody trusts a year later. So we do it differently. We map before we build. We write the acceptance criteria before we invoice. We run everything in your own cloud, log every run, and re-test it every time the model changes. And we say no — to automating a process that should be fixed first, to building something you cannot own, and to retainers that never end. We are a small team. The engineer you meet in the mapping session is the one who builds it.
The mapping session is 45 minutes. During the build, expect a few hours in the first week while the engineer learns the process, then a short weekly check-in.
Nobody does. Part of what the session produces is what to fix first — sometimes a process needs tidying before it is worth automating, and we will say so.
On your own infrastructure. The automation runs in your cloud account; we do not take custody of your data to make it work.
Keeping the automation alive: monitoring every run, re-testing it whenever the underlying model changes, the calculator that tracks what it returns, and fixing it when it breaks. Drift shows up on your dashboard, not in a customer complaint.
You hold the code and the documentation, and nothing in it is tied to one vendor’s cloud, database or model.
No. You are buying a working automation with acceptance criteria. We do ask for feedback and a write-up, and that is stated above.
Free. 45 minutes. The map is yours either way.
