Why human time costs more than software subscriptions

We were recently asked a simple question: how does the cost of human time compare to the cost of a SaaS subscription? It felt worth unpacking properly, and we would genuinely love to hear how others think about it.

Do SaaS subscriptions look expensive?

SaaS (Software As A Service) i.e. paying for a piece of software or tool, often feels expensive because it is visible. It shows up as a line item, hits a card every month, and can be cancelled with a click or phone call. That visibility makes it easy to scrutinise.

Human time works very differently. Its cost is diffused across salaries, absorbed into “just how we work”, and rarely questioned at a task level. Low-value work quietly sprawls, even when everyone agrees they are busy.

This visibility bias explains why companies will debate a £300 subscription for weeks, while accepting hours of manual effort as normal.

False frugality in practice

Cutting software spend often feels prudent, but it usually creates compensating behaviour. Spreadsheets appear. Workarounds multiply. Slack pings increase. People duplicate effort because systems or colleagues do not talk to each other.

You save £500 a month and quietly introduce 30 or 40 hours of friction across the team. No one owns that cost, so it goes unchallenged.

Time is the scarcest resource

Money can be reallocated next quarter. Lost time never comes back.

Context switching, broken workflows, and manual admin all tax attention and focus. A junior employee losing flow several times a day because tools do not integrate pays an invisible productivity penalty that never appears on a P&L. Time saved is not just time reduced. It is time redirected to higher-leverage work, the kind that actually moves outcomes.

Do we really need another tool?

“Another tool” often sounds like another login, another thing to manage, another distraction. That framing misses the real question. Does the work exist because the tool does not? If a process only survives through human heroics, follow-ups, and manual stitching, it is already expensive. Software does not add work; it removes it, when applied properly.

A real cost comparison from Motortech.ai

We looked at our own customer base to ground this discussion in data.

In one case study with FG Barnes, we measured a time saving of around 50 hours per month, roughly six working days returned to the team. This would have cost over £1,000 to pay staff to do the same job. That’s before we account for the nearly £5,000 of incremental profit generated by AIME. So £6k in extra bottom line for a SAAS subscription that costs under £500.

We then normalised this analysis across our wider customer base. When scaled to a typical 100-car retailer, AIME saves teams an average of 30 hours per month. That is the equivalent of four full working days.

To put a conservative value on that time, assume a £40,000 annual salary. Once you account for employer National Insurance, pension contributions, and other on-costs, a realistic fully loaded cost is around £29 per hour.

For a dealer carrying 100 vehicles, the software costs around £350 per month. The time it gives back is worth roughly £900 per month at conservative employment costs. That is a 2.5× return before counting any uplift in profit (likely 5x the time saving amount), response times, or customer experience.

The point is not that SaaS is cheap. It is that human time is far more expensive than most organisations admit.