Back to the calculatorMethodology

How we calculate your ROI

Your estimate isn't a random number. It's built from your inputs, the options you pick in the quiz, and a small set of labor-cost assumptions that we document here so you can challenge them.

At a glance:
annual_savings = annual_hours_saved × fully_loaded_hourly_rate

Base hourly rate

We divide your average annual salary by your typical weekly hours times 50 weeks (not 52, to account for vacation and holidays — a conservative standard).

$65,000 / (40 × 50) = $32.50/hour

Fully-loaded rate (1.3×)

An employee's real cost to the company is not just their salary. Employers also pay payroll taxes, statutory benefits (13th-month pay, profit-sharing in Mexico, etc.), healthcare, and operating overhead (office, software, equipment, training). In Mexico this usually adds 25–40% on top of base salary. We use 1.3× as a balanced, conservative midpoint.

$32.50 × 1.3 = $42.25/hour

Weekly hours saved

For each question in the quiz, Gemini estimates timeSaving (hours per affected employee per week) and impactRatio (the fraction of your workforce the opportunity touches). We multiply: time_saved = timeSaving × (employees × impactRatio), and sum across all 10 questions.

2 hrs × (40 emp × 0.3) = 24 hrs/week on invoices

Annual savings

Weekly hours × 50 gives annual hours reclaimed company-wide. Multiply by the fully-loaded hourly rate and you get the annual labor savings headline.

16,920 hrs × $42.25 ≈ $714,870 / year

Implementation cost range

A rough build + rollout estimate scaled to team size (at least $15,000 for the smallest engagement, linearly increasing with headcount). Real quotes vary a lot with scope — this is a directional range, not a bid.

max($15,000, employees × $300) → up to 3× for complex rollouts

Payback period

How many months of annual savings it takes to cover the low end of the implementation estimate. Under a year is the norm for well-scoped automations.

$15,000 / ($714,870 / 12) ≈ 1 month

Honest limits

Why real-world results often land at 50–70% of this figure

We'd rather tell you the truth about the estimate than oversell it.

01Hours saved only become money saved if that time gets reinvested into productive work. If it just becomes more coffee breaks, the cost base doesn't actually shrink.
02Adoption takes time. Year 1 typically captures 40–60% of the potential as teams learn new tools; years 2–3 reach 80–90% in steady state.
03AI isn't 100% accurate. There's almost always a human review step that eats back a small share of the time saved.
04External bottlenecks cap the ceiling. If a process depends on people outside your company — a vendor's portal, a customer's response time — AI can't fix what it can't touch.

Take the assessment →