RPA vs. Simple Scripts: When Founders Over-Engineer Automation

You're drowning in repetitive tasks. Someone mentions RPA. You research UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and suddenly you're comparing $750/month licenses.

Stop.

Most startups waste money on RPA when a 50-line Python script would work better.

The RPA Pricing Reality

RPA vendors make automation sound inevitable. Their pricing tells a different story.

Current RPA costs (2025-2026):

• Automation Anywhere: $750/month for one unattended bot
• UiPath: $420/month with limited bot capacity
• Microsoft Power Automate: $150/month for unattended automation
• Pilot programs for small businesses: $20K-$60K

Notice what's missing? The implementation costs.

That $750/month license is just the entry fee. Companies report spending 3-5x the license cost on consulting, training, and maintenance. A $20K pilot becomes a $60K project once you add the hidden expenses.

What RPA Vendors Don't Tell You

The ROI stats sound impressive. McKinsey estimates 30-200% ROI in the first year. Companies report 25-80% operational cost reduction.

Those numbers come from established enterprises with stable processes.

RPA makes sense when you have:

• High transaction volumes that overwhelm humans
• Established workflows that rarely change
• Compliance requirements demanding consistency
• Multiple systems that need data transfers
• Budget exceeding $20K for automation initiatives

Startups have none of these. You're still figuring out your processes. Your workflows change weekly. Your transaction volume is a rounding error.

The Pivot Problem

RPA platforms market themselves as "low-code" and flexible. They're lying.

Building a bot takes hours. Maintaining it as your business changes takes more. Every time you pivot your product, adjust your workflow, or change your data structure, those bots break.

A $750/month license doesn't include the time cost of constantly updating broken automations. When you're moving fast and changing direction, RPA becomes technical debt.

Simple scripts are different. When your process changes, you open a text file, modify a few lines, and you're done. No visual workflow editor. No bot management console. No vendor lock-in.

When Scripts Beat RPA

You're an early-stage startup if:

• You're still finding product-market fit
• Your processes aren't documented yet
• You pivot quarterly (or monthly)
• Your transaction volume is under 1,000/month
• Your automation budget is under $20K

In this environment, choose scripts when you need:

• Data extraction from websites: BeautifulSoup or Selenium handles this in 30 lines
• CSV processing and transformations: Pandas does in minutes what RPA does in hours
• API integrations: Requests library plus 20 lines of Python
• Email automation: SMTP library or SendGrid API
• File organization: OS and shutil libraries handle most cases

The code is portable. You can run it anywhere. It costs nothing except your time. When your startup pivots, you rewrite it in an afternoon.

The Volume Threshold

RPA makes economic sense at scale. But what scale?

Research suggests RPA pays off when you're processing thousands of transactions daily. Financial services automating invoice processing. Insurance companies handling claims. Healthcare systems managing patient records.

Below that threshold, the overhead kills you. License fees, training time, maintenance windows, update cycles. The tool becomes more expensive than the problem.

A founder spending 2 hours/week on a manual task wastes 104 hours/year. At $100/hour opportunity cost, that's $10,400 annually. A script taking 4 hours to write and 1 hour/quarter to maintain costs $10,400 once.

RPA costs $9,000-$180,000 annually before implementation and training.

The math only works when you're automating dozens of processes affecting multiple team members. That's not early-stage territory.

The Low-Code Trap

"Low-code" sounds perfect for non-technical founders. Point, click, automate.

Reality check: low-code platforms still require dedicated resources to maintain. Someone needs to understand the visual workflow, debug when things break, and update when systems change.

You're not avoiding technical work. You're outsourcing it to a proprietary platform with a monthly fee and a learning curve.

Compare to a simple script. ChatGPT can write it. You can read it. Any developer can modify it. It runs forever with no licensing fees.

The "low-code" advantage disappears when you factor in platform lock-in, vendor dependency, and the time cost of visual debugging.

What You Actually Need

Most startup automation falls into three categories:

Category 1: Data movement

Moving data from one system to another. Zapier handles 80% of these cases for $20/month. The remaining 20% needs a custom API integration, not RPA.

Category 2: Data transformation

Processing spreadsheets, cleaning datasets, generating reports. Python with Pandas handles this in minutes. No RPA required.

Category 3: Web interaction

Filling forms, clicking buttons, extracting content. Selenium works fine. Playwright if you want something modern. Both are free and scriptable.

None of these justify a $750/month RPA license. None require visual workflow designers or bot management consoles.

You need simple tools that do one thing well, not enterprise platforms designed for Fortune 500 companies.

When RPA Actually Makes Sense

RPA isn't always wrong. It solves real problems at the right scale.

Use RPA when you:

• Process 10,000+ transactions monthly
• Work in heavily regulated industries (finance, healthcare, insurance)
• Need audit trails and compliance documentation
• Have stable, well-documented processes
• Employ a dedicated operations team
• Can afford $20K+ implementation costs

This describes established companies, not startups. If you're reading this, you're probably not there yet.

By the time you need RPA, you'll have operations people who can evaluate vendors and manage implementations. You won't be Googling "RPA vs scripting" at 2am.

The Maintenance Reality

RPA vendors emphasize setup time. "Deploy a bot in hours!" They downplay maintenance.

Bots break. Systems change. APIs update. Websites redesign. That "deployed in hours" bot requires ongoing attention.

Scripts break too, but fixing them is straightforward. Open the code, find the issue, fix it, run it. No vendor support tickets. No waiting for platform updates.

The maintenance burden of RPA scales with complexity. Every bot you add increases the surface area for failures. Visual workflows make debugging harder, not easier.

Simple scripts scale linearly with your growth. More automation needs mean more scripts, but each script remains independently maintainable.

Start Small, Stay Flexible

Your first automation should take 2 hours to build and solve an annoying problem. Not a strategic initiative. Not a company-wide transformation. Just one painful task made automatic.

Good first automation projects:

• Downloading daily reports from multiple sources
• Sending weekly summaries via email
• Converting file formats in bulk
• Updating spreadsheets from API data
• Monitoring competitor pricing

Write a script. See if it works. If it saves time, keep it. If your process changes, rewrite it.

This approach keeps you flexible while you're still figuring out your business. You're not locked into expensive platforms or complex visual workflows.

The AI Development Angle

Modern AI tools make simple scripting even more accessible. ChatGPT can write a Python script to automate most tasks in seconds. Cursor can help you debug and improve it.

You don't need to be a developer anymore. Describe your problem, get a script, run it. When it breaks, paste the error into ChatGPT and get a fix.

This changes the RPA equation. The "low-code" advantage of visual workflow designers matters less when AI can write actual code for you. Better to own simple, readable code than rent access to a proprietary platform.

Building AI-powered automation is cheaper and more flexible than traditional RPA. You're writing the automation logic once and running it forever.

Cost Comparison Over Time

Let's model 3 years of automation costs.

RPA approach:

• Year 1: $9,000 licenses + $30,000 implementation = $39,000
• Year 2: $9,000 licenses + $5,000 maintenance = $14,000
• Year 3: $9,000 licenses + $5,000 maintenance = $14,000
• Total: $67,000

Scripting approach:

• Year 1: 40 hours @ $100/hour = $4,000
• Year 2: 8 hours maintenance = $800
• Year 3: 8 hours maintenance = $800
• Total: $5,600

The difference is $61,400 over three years. That pays for a lot of actual product development.

RPA vendors will argue their solution scales better. Maybe. But you're not at scale yet. And when you reach scale, those numbers get worse, not better.

The Real Question

Don't ask "should we use RPA?" Ask "what's the simplest thing that could possibly work?"

Usually it's a script. Sometimes it's Zapier. Occasionally it's a manual process that should stay manual because it happens twice a year.

RPA is almost never the answer for early-stage startups. By the time you need it, you'll know. Your ops team will be begging for it. Your transaction volumes will justify the cost. Your processes will be stable enough to automate reliably.

Until then, write scripts. Keep them simple. Own your automation. Stay flexible.

That's how you build fast while staying lean.

Ready to build automation the right way? We help startups implement AI-powered workflows that scale with your business, not against it.