Automation Maintenance Cost Calculator

What keeping a live automation or AI system running costs a year, in BLS pay and your own hours

FreeNo credit cardResults in 2 minutesUsed by 500+ companies

1. What you run

2. Who does the work, and other costs

Result

Maintenance cost per year
$36,629
Hours of work per month
30 h
Labour cost per month
$3,052
Cost per system per month
$610
Per yearUSD
Routine upkeep (10 h a month)$12,210
Fixing failures (12 h a month)$14,652
Changes (8 h a month)$9,768
Run costs$0.00
Cost of failures to the business$0.00

Loaded pay is $102 an hour at the figures above.

The formulas

Loaded pay per hour   = annual pay x (1 + benefits %) / 2,080
Hours per month       = systems x upkeep hours + failures x hours per fix + change hours
Labour per month      = hours per month x loaded pay per hour
Cost per year         = labour per month x 12 + run costs x 12 + failures x cost per failure x 12
Per system per month  = cost per year / 12 / systems
Retainer comparison   = labour per month x 12 - retainer per month x 12
What this number does not include. Recruiting the engineer, the work that only happens when something breaks badly, cover for holidays and sickness, training, and the effect of a bad release on customers beyond the cost per failure you enter. The hours and failure counts are your inputs, so the result is only as good as your logs.

How this works

Pay starts from US Bureau of Labor Statistics data (OEWS, May 2025): software developers (15-1252) at a mean of $148,100 a year. Benefits default to 42.9%, the BLS private-industry average for June 2026. Every hour is priced at that loaded pay on the 2,080-hour year BLS uses to convert hourly wages to yearly pay.

Maintenance time has three parts: routine upkeep for each system, the hours it takes to fix each failure, and changes. The tool does not assume a percentage of build cost per year or any other rule of thumb. The number of systems, hours, failures, run costs and the cost of a failure are placeholders that you replace from your own alert history and bills.

Worked example with the defaults: loaded pay is $148,100 x 1.429 / 2,080 = $101.75 an hour. Upkeep is 5 systems x 2 hours = 10 hours, fixes are 4 failures x 3 hours = 12 hours, and changes are 8 hours, so 30 hours a month. That is $3,052.43 a month and $36,629.12 a year, or $610.49 per system per month.

Sources (read November 12, 2026)

AY Automate maintains workflow automations and the code around them, "including systems we did not build." See automation maintenance and support.

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