Transactional pricing models are everywhere in enterprise software. Pay per use, pay per transaction, pay per seat. The pitch is familiar: lower upfront cost, flexibility to scale, no long-term commitment. For many software categories, it makes reasonable sense.
For automation, it tends to look different two years in.
Jimmy Lewis, co-founder of TrueFocus Automation and a veteran of more than two decades in title insurance operations, has watched the economics of that choice play out repeatedly with clients. His company has built over 840 bots supporting more than 2,500 automated workflows, and the question of who owns the underlying code has become one of the most consequential decisions a company makes when entering an automation engagement.
The issue, Lewis says, is that most clients don’t think through the math until they’re already locked in. “When clients have been paying a transactional fee, a lot of them have the mindset that this is just how we do things with vendors,” he says. “But then they start running the numbers.”
The Math That Changes the Conversation
Transactional pricing scales with volume, which is manageable when volumes are modest and predictable, but harder to justify when the business grows or throughput doubles because the automation is working exactly as intended.
Consider a title company using a SaaS automation tool to process new orders. At 50 orders a day, the transactional fee is tolerable. At 150 orders a day, the same fee structure has tripled the cost of running a process the company had already paid to build, test, and refine. The vendor benefits directly from the company’s own growth.
The alternative is a build-and-own model. The company pays once to have the automation developed, retains the source code, and takes on a fixed annual maintenance cost rather than a variable transaction fee. TrueFocus Automation’s average build runs approximately $9,500, with annual maintenance in the $8,000 to $10,000 range. For any process displacing at least half a full-time equivalent role, the first-year return on investment is typically achievable, and the cost curve only improves as volume grows.
What Happens When Enterprise Clients Wake Up
Lewis describes a pattern that has repeated with larger clients over the years. A company enters an automation engagement, opts for the transactional model because it feels lower risk, and runs with it for a year or two. Then someone runs a comparison.
At that point, the client wants to know what it would cost to acquire the code outright. Lewis and his team have settled on a pricing formula for these situations: 1.5-2 times the original build price. The logic is straightforward. TrueFocus took on the development risk, the support burden, and the ongoing optimization work. The premium reflects that investment.
Importantly, owning the code does not mean owning the expertise. Bots built on deep knowledge of a specific production environment, document type, or workflow exception pattern are not easily handed off to a generalist IT team for maintenance. The client relationship continues – just on different terms. “If they own the code and something needs to change, they’re probably still going to come to us,” Lewis says. “Processes change. Systems change. They’re still going to need support.”
Security, Control, and the IP Question
Beyond the financial calculation, ownership carries distinct strategic implications. For enterprise-grade operations, intellectual property and data control are not afterthoughts.
TrueFocus builds all automation to run either within the client’s own network infrastructure or on US-based, ISO and SOC-certified cloud hosting. No code runs in offshore data centers, and no sensitive workflow logic sits on a vendor’s proprietary platform where access depends on a continued commercial relationship.
That distinction matters more than it might appear. A company whose automation runs inside a SaaS vendor’s ecosystem cannot easily inspect the code, cannot modify it without vendor approval, and cannot migrate it if the vendor changes pricing, gets acquired, or discontinues the product. Automation becomes a dependency rather than an asset. “Some people are just not of the mindset to pay transactional rates for the next five or ten years,” Lewis says. “The bigger companies, especially. They want to own what gets built.”
For mid-size operations, the calculation is similar, even if the dollar figures are smaller. A process that runs once a month but carries significant compliance risk, such as a government filing with hard deadlines and financial penalties for late submission, justifies a $4,000 build cost simply for the assurance that the code runs on the company’s own terms and timeline.
What Good Looks Like Before You Sign
For any organization evaluating an automation vendor, the ownership question should surface early. Lewis identifies three practical tests.
The first is what the pricing model looks like if volume doubles. A transactional vendor should be able to give a precise answer. If the response is vague, it warrants further scrutiny. The second is whether the client can see the code. A build-and-own vendor should be willing to transfer source code at project completion; a SaaS vendor cannot or will not. The third is what happens if the relationship ends. Contracts dissolve, vendors get acquired, and budget cycles change. Understanding what the company retains if the engagement concludes is due diligence, not pessimism.
The companies that have gotten the most long-term value from automation, in Lewis’s experience, are the ones that treated their first bot as an asset rather than a subscription. That shift in perspective changes what questions get asked before signing and how the answers get evaluated.
Jimmy Lewis is the co-founder of TrueFocus Automation, specializing in RPA and AI-powered workflow automation for title insurance, mortgage, and real estate operations. TrueFocus has built 840+ automation bots, automated over 2,500 workflows, and returned more than 1.3 million working hours to clients.
This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice. The views and opinions expressed herein reflect those of the individuals quoted and do not represent an endorsement of any company, product, or service mentioned. Readers should conduct their own due diligence and consult qualified professionals before making any investment decisions.
