For IT
Under every approval threshold anyone has ever written down.
The reason your people keep asking for automation tools and then dropping it is that the smallest useful plan costs more than the idea is obviously worth, so it needs a budget line, so it needs you. A department's worth of automations here bills in cents — which means the conversation that normally kills the idea never starts.
Cost calculator
Work out which side of the threshold this falls on.
The difference is not a discount we are funding. It is that everything on SproutOS sleeps when nothing is happening, and a small internal tool is idle almost all of the time — whereas a rented instance is billed for the hour it exists, not the hour it is used.
12 apps
How busy they are
hourly jobs, hundreds of visitors
On SproutOS
$3
per month, estimated
Supabase Pro
$135
plan, plus compute per project
Smallest AWS stack
$623
always on, per app
An estimate built from the example figures published elsewhere on this site, not a quote. The SproutOS column scales a worked example of one small app with its own database; the other two are the cheapest always-on option each vendor sells. Your real bill depends on your real usage, and nothing here has a monthly floor.
What you are actually approving
A prepaid balance, and code in your own repositories.
There is no seat, no plan and no minimum. Credit is bought up front and drawn down by usage; when it runs out, new work is refused rather than quietly billed. That is a spend cap by construction, which is usually the thing an approver actually wants and rarely the thing they are offered.
- You can see exactly what it does
- Every automation is code in a repository you own, with a plain-language description of what it touches and a log of every run. Review it like any other pull request, or don't — it is there either way.
- There is nothing for you to run
- No box to patch, no n8n server to keep upright, no upgrade that breaks a credential at eleven at night. The failure mode of this tool is not a machine your team is responsible for.
- There is nothing for you to support
- People describe what they want in their own words and it runs. The tickets you would normally get — build me this, fix my script, why is the runner down — mostly do not get raised.
- Access is scoped and revocable
- Each project's credentials belong to that project. Nobody in the company ever holds a cloud credential, and revoking a grant revokes what it created.
Your team stops needing technical resources to deploy the software they already know they want.
The same argument, written for the people who will actually be using it, is on the employees page.