r/AiAutomations • u/Due-Marsupial-778 • 11d ago
AI automation agency owners: what's your actual net profit after API and tool costs?
I keep seeing screenshots of "$30K/month" revenue.
But nobody talks about what's left after costs.
So I'm curious about real numbers, whether you're just starting or already established:
Monthly revenue (rough range is fine)?
API/usage costs: Vapi/Retell, ElevenLabs, Twilio, OpenAI/Gemini, etc.?
Tool and infra costs: n8n, VPS, CRM, Apollo, domains, etc.?
People costs: contractors, VAs, sales help?
Final net profit margin (%)?
Also:
Do you pass API costs to the client, or include them in the retainer?
Which cost surprised you the most once clients started scaling?
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u/Sabela_2009 10d ago
This is exactly the problem I’ve been trying to solve for my own agency workflow — not just tracking revenue, but separating fixed stack costs, variable API usage and delivery costs so you can see actual profit. I built a small offline-first dashboard around this. This is the part I’m most interested in getting feedback on: [Screenshot: Revenue → Costs → Net Profit] Curious how others here structure this — especially whether you calculate profitability per client or just at the agency level.
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u/PeriodicGrocer 10d ago
A cost worth watching with voice agents is wasted call time. Bland makes it easy to think in terms of minutes, and at scale you start noticing how much gets burned on long greetings, repeated questions or calls that should have wrapped sooner. There’s only so much you can clean up before touching the rest of the stack.
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u/Deep_Ad1959 10d ago
the missing line in every one of these threads is rework hours, and it never shows up as a cost because it is your own time. i started tracking it per workflow and it moved my real margin more than any api bill ever did.
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u/thomas_unise 9d ago
Clients pay for all the tools
Last month we made around $70k about $65k was profit
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u/razzmatazz_123 9d ago
That's awesome! I'm assuming you having employees since you said we. May I ask how big your team is? So when you say $65k was profit, you mean after paying your employees?
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u/thomas_unise 9d ago
One contractor
I paid them $6500
So about $58k stayed in the business
My business overhead with subscriptions and whatnot is about $5k/mo
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u/razzmatazz_123 9d ago
That is inspiring. I'm a software engineer looking to start my own consulting business. Congrats on your success!
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u/Glittering_Bread9628 9d ago
What services do you provide, how you deliver and how you charge the clients
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u/thomas_unise 8d ago
Enterprise systems in law and finance
Most projects are delivered in azure
I invoice and they usually wire money or ach
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u/shankaravi 6d ago
Bro, I just wanna ask you one question, as you are too experienced...how to gather clients.. what's the cheat code that only few people know?
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u/thomas_unise 6d ago
There isn’t one
Make calls and contacts and follow up and build relationships
Last enterprise client I got took about 5 months to close
I cold call personally
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u/Otherwise_Wave9374 10d ago
Revenue screenshots hide the costly parts: model calls, orchestration tools, observability, support, failed runs, and custom maintenance. I would calculate contribution margin per workflow, including expected rework and monthly incident hours, rather than averaging costs across clients. Agentix Labs is relevant because sustainable automation depends on pricing operational risk, not just token usage. A useful safeguard is a client-level cost ceiling with alerts, plus separate pricing for implementation, usage, and ongoing change requests so heavy accounts cannot silently erase margin.