How long does a personal automation take to build?
About two hours, with help
Your first working personal automation takes about two hours when someone who has done it before sits next to you, which is exactly what the $250 Sit-Down is. A fuller setup, briefings plus logistics plus guarded bookings, is a scoped project measured in days of work spread over a week or two, from $1,500.
What makes it fast or slow
Speed is decided by three things: whether your information already lives somewhere machine-readable (a calendar, an inbox, a spreadsheet), whether the task has a clear definition of done, and whether money or messages leave your accounts (guardrails take real time to do right, and they are not optional).
The part nobody budgets for
Watching it afterward. An automation that nobody checks fails silently, and the fix is monitoring, not hope. That is why every setup we do ships with checks that define what a good result looks like, and why the optional watch exists for people who want the checking done for them.
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