An honest comparison
Ace Work vs. hiring an automation agency
Short version: an agency builds what you brief. The expensive problems are the ones nobody briefs: the workflows too small for any agency to touch, and the change management after launch that was never in the SOW.
Credit where it's due
Good automation agencies exist.
Skilled builders, real delivery, working automations at the end. If you know what you need built and it's big enough to justify the engagement, a good agency will build it well.
Keep that sentence in mind: big enough to justify the engagement. That's the crack this whole page lives in.
An agency starts with your brief. Your brief is a guess.
Before an agency can help you, your team has to figure out where the time goes, which workflow is most broken, and what fixing it is worth. That's the hardest part of the job, and in the agency model you do it yourself, for free, before day one.
So what gets briefed? Whatever somebody complained about loudest. Meanwhile the most expensive broken work never makes it into a brief because nobody knew it was there. One of our clients had $1.8M of waste sitting in a single payroll process. Nobody briefed an agency to find it. Finding it isn't in anyone's brief.
Ace Work maps how your whole company actually works, every workflow, every team, priced in time and money, and ranks what's worth fixing. The brief writes itself, from evidence.
Then anyone can build it. Including your team.
Here's where we're different from what you'd expect. The roadmap isn't locked to our builders. Every fix Ace Work suggests comes fully specified, and anyone can build it. Your ops person. Your Make wizard. The agency you already like working with. Our forward deployed experts when you want them.
That matters because the constraint at most companies was never building skill. It was knowing what to build. Give a capable team a ranked, priced roadmap and they'll ship it. The map doesn't care who holds the wrench.
The comparison people actually mean.
Automation agency
Ace Work
Who finds the work
Automation agency
You do, before day one.
Ace Work
The platform. Every workflow mapped and priced in time and money.
Who can build it
Automation agency
The agency.
Ace Work
Anyone. Your team, your agency, our experts. The map doesn't care.
The small workflows
Automation agency
Never worth the engagement.
Ace Work
Self-service micro workflows, built in minutes, no invoice.
After launch
Automation agency
Ships, invoices, leaves.
Ace Work
Onboarding, change management, ongoing improvement.
Proof it worked
Automation agency
A demo and an invoice.
Ace Work
Every run reports what it saved, in time and money.
The incentive
Automation agency
Bigger build, bigger invoice.
Ace Work
Flat subscription. Ranked roadmap. Some of it doesn't rank.
And the small stuff, no human should build at all
Every company has hundreds of tiny broken workflows. The status update someone assembles by hand. The weekly export-reformat-forward. The twenty-minute-a-week paper cuts.
No agency will ever fix these, and honestly, no human should. By the time you've scoped, briefed, and paid a builder's day rate, you've spent more than the workflow wastes in a year. The economics of human building have a floor, and the long tail of broken work lives entirely below it.
This is where Ace Work stops resembling an agency at all. Micro workflows get created in the platform, self-service, in minutes. Your team fixes their own paper cuts without a scoping call, a brief, or an invoice. Added up across a company, the long tail is most of the invisible tax, and it's only reachable this way.
The part after launch that was never in the SOW
An agency ships, invoices, and leaves. What it leaves is software. But an automation nobody adopts saves nothing, and adoption is the part that was never in the scope: onboarding the team, changing the habit, handling the "we've always done it this way," noticing what drifted, improving it next quarter.
That's the part we don't hand off. Onboarding, change management, ongoing improvement, with every run reporting what it actually saved. An agency's job ends at launch. Launch is where the saving starts or doesn't.
Fair questions.
An agency's product is the build. Ours is the map, the roadmap, and what happens after launch. The clearest proof: you can take our roadmap and have someone else build it. No agency would let you do that, because the build is all they're selling.
Then you're our favorite kind of client. Your team gets a ranked, priced roadmap instead of a suggestion box, the platform handles the long tail that's beneath their time, and we handle the adoption work nobody enjoys. Your builders build. They stop having to find, sell, and babysit.
No. Point them at the roadmap. They'll do better work with evidence than with a guess, and you'll finally know if what they build pays back.
A workshop is two days of interviews and a deck, based on what people remembered to say, and its conclusions have a habit of matching whatever the agency sells. The map is continuous, covers every team, and prices each workflow in time and money.
Then brief an agency and get it built. Come back when you want to know what the other hundred workflows are costing you.
See what your work actually costs.
Thirty minutes. We'll map where your team's time goes and what fixing it is worth, before you build or buy anything.