This isn't a layoff pitch. It's a cost comparison, and it's more honest when it includes the part most vendors leave out.
The numbers people are searching for
A full-time hire in the US commonly runs $55,000–$95,000 a year once benefits and overhead are counted — call it $4,500–$8,000 a month in real cost, before recruiting and training. Digital-worker tools, by contrast, typically run in the low hundreds of dollars a month, sometimes with a one-time setup cost on top.
That gap is real. It's also not the whole picture, and any comparison that stops there is selling something.
The part that gets left out
An unmonitored automation tool costs more than its subscription price once you count the hours spent checking its work, fixing mistakes, and rewriting what it produced. And no digital tool is a like-for-like replacement for the open-ended judgment a person brings — relationships, complex decisions, accountability, licensed work. That's not a knock on the tools. It's just what they are and aren't.
Where this actually lands
The workflows worth automating are the repeatable ones: missed-call follow-up, stale-opportunity review, CRM cleanup, draft preparation. The workflows that still need a person are judgment calls, relationships, and anything where being wrong is expensive. A governed digital worker with human approval built in doesn't replace that person — it removes the repeatable work sitting on their desk so the judgment calls get their actual attention.
What "governed" changes about the math
The oversight-cost problem above is specifically a problem with *unmonitored* automation. A worker that requires human approval before anything customer-facing happens doesn't eliminate oversight — it makes oversight the design, not an afterthought you discover after something goes wrong. That's a different cost structure than "cheap tool, expensive cleanup."
Next step
If you're weighing a new hire against automating a specific workflow, start with the workflow, not the tool. A [Lead Leak Check](/lead-leak-check) shows where the repeatable work actually is before you decide how to staff it.
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Cost figures referenced above are drawn from general industry reporting on small-business hiring and AI-tool costs, not Vayna-specific data.