The biggest cost driver is scope. A taxidermy studio's manual work breaks into pieces: intake forms and deposits at drop-off, status updates to customers during the months a mount takes to finish, ready-for-pickup notices, and the seasonal crunch when hunting season floods intake all at once. Automating one piece, like sending pickup notices when a mount is done, is a small, contained build. Wiring intake, deposits, status updates, and pickup notices together into one operations system that tracks every job from drop-off to collection is a bigger build, because it has to hold state on dozens of jobs at once and act correctly at each stage without a person checking in. And if you want customers logging into a portal to pay deposits, check status themselves, and book drop-off slots, that's a different tier again: a real product with payments, accounts, and a database behind it, not just a workflow.
The second driver is whether the work is build-only or build-and-operate. Everything we build runs through the tools a studio already uses (calendar, payment processor, email or text), with guardrails so it doesn't do anything it shouldn't. A one-time build hands you a working system and stops there; if something breaks during peak season, you're the one fixing it. Build-and-operate means we keep the system running: watching it, fixing failures, adjusting it as intake volume swings from quiet months to hunting season, and stepping in only when a request genuinely needs a person, like a dispute over a damaged hide or a custom pose that needs a judgment call. Operating a system costs more than building it once, but it's what keeps a seasonal intake spike from turning into a backlog of missed status updates.
We don't have a price list for this, and we wouldn't trust one if we saw it elsewhere, because a studio doing twenty mounts a year and one doing twenty a week need different systems entirely. We quote each engagement on what the system is worth to the studio: fewer hours spent on the phone during peak season, fewer customers calling to ask where their piece is, fewer missed deposits. The way to find the real number is a short conversation about your intake volume, your busiest months, and which of these tasks eats the most of your time right now. Judge it the same way: look at what you'd still be doing by hand after the system is running, and compare that against what you're paying for the system plus your own time back.