5 business automations you can hire out for under $500

Most owners assume automation is a five-figure consulting project. In 2026 that is simply wrong. A specialist working in n8n, Make or Zapier can ship a focused, single-process automation in a day or two — and on a marketplace with escrow and fixed-price bids, that lands in the $150–500 range. Here are five we see quoted constantly, with realistic prices and what a good brief looks like for each.

1. New lead → spreadsheet/CRM → instant notification ($150–300)

Every enquiry from your website form, Facebook page or WhatsApp lands in one sheet or CRM, and the right person gets pinged in Slack or by email within a minute. No more leads rotting in an inbox over the weekend. This is the single most common first automation — half a day of work for an experienced builder.

2. Invoice and payment-chasing follow-ups ($200–400)

Invoice issued in Xero or QuickBooks → reminder sequence at 3, 7 and 14 days → flagged list when paid. Businesses using this typically cut average payment time by a week or more. The build is mostly templated emails plus status checks, so it stays cheap.

3. Order → fulfilment sheet → customer updates ($250–500)

Shopify or WooCommerce order arrives → row created in your fulfilment sheet or warehouse system → customer gets a confirmation and later a tracking update. This kills the daily copy-paste routine and the 'where is my order' tickets with it. Price depends on how many systems have to talk to each other.

4. Weekly report that writes itself ($200–450)

Sales, ad spend and stock pulled into one dashboard or a Monday-morning email, every week, nobody touching it. Owners consistently underestimate this one: the build is easy, the value is the hour a day someone currently spends assembling numbers.

5. AI answering routine customer questions ($300–500 to start)

A chatbot trained on your FAQs, price list and policies, embedded on your site or WhatsApp, with anything unusual handed to a human. A focused first version — ten to twenty real question types — is absolutely a sub-$500 job. The enterprise-priced versions you read about are a different animal.

What actually moves the price

• Number of systems involved — two apps is cheap, five is not
• Messy data — if the source data needs cleaning first, say so up front
• Volume — 50 orders a month and 5,000 are different builds
• How clear your brief is — a one-page brief gets you quotes in hours, a vague one gets you questions for days

The pattern to notice: none of these require custom software. They are wiring between tools you already pay for. Post any of them as a fixed-price project, let specialists bid, and compare real quotes — that is the fastest way to find out what your specific version costs.