The biggest driver is scope, not the distillery itself. A single workflow, say handling tour and tasting bookings end to end (confirming, sending reminders, reslotting when someone cancels), is a contained build. A multi-part operations system that also chases wholesale reorders, manages bottle-club shipment schedules, and triages event inquiries is more code, more integration points, and more edge cases to handle correctly, so it costs more to build and more to keep running. If the distillery eventually needs a real product on top, like a member portal with payments, login, and shipping logic across many customers, that's a different category of work again, closer to a full application than an automation.
The second driver is whether the work stops at build or continues as operate. A build-only engagement hands over a working system and steps back. Build-and-operate means we keep it running: watching for failures, retrying when a booking platform or shipping API hiccups, and escalating to a person when something needs real judgment, like a wholesale account that's gone quiet for a reason a script can't diagnose. Operate costs more over time because it's ongoing work, but it's also what keeps a system reliable through a busy tasting-room season or a distributor's platform change without someone having to notice and fix it by hand.
We don't have a price list because cost follows the value a system creates, not the hours it takes to build, so similar-looking work can price differently depending on what a distillery actually gets back: fewer missed reorders, fewer double-booked tastings, bottle-club shipments that go out on schedule without someone tracking a spreadsheet. The honest way to judge whether it's worth it is to look at how much of a week currently goes to repetitive follow-up, like chasing wholesale accounts or confirming bookings, versus decisions that genuinely need a person's judgment. If most of it is the former, a system usually earns back the attention it frees up. The right next step is a short conversation about the specific workflows involved, since that's the only way to scope it honestly.