Build, buy or wait
Four questions about how often this happens, how much judgement it needs, what you could spend, and who would build it. A straight answer, with the reasoning shown.
- FREE
- NO EMAIL
- 2 MINUTES
- NOTHING SAVED OR SENT
How often does this actually happen?
RIGHT NOW, BASED ON YOUR ANSWERS
No-code platform
Zapier or Make
WORKED EXAMPLE, NOT YOUR ANSWERS
A five-person ops team logs supplier invoices most days. It is almost entirely rule-based, just the odd exception, there is around £3,000 to spend, and nobody in-house can code.
No-code platform
Rule-based enough for Zapier or Make, and nobody in-house needs to become a developer to run it.
How it decides
- Is this a hidden scoring formula?
- No. It is four questions feeding a short decision tree, checked in a fixed order: judgement first, then frequency and budget together, then who would build it. The same four answers always produce the same result.
- Why does judgement come first?
- Because it rules out a rules-only tool regardless of budget or team. If a task genuinely needs a person to weigh up each case, Zapier and Make cannot do that part, whatever else is true about volume or money.
- Why would it say Wait?
- Two reasons. Either the work needs real judgement but does not happen often enough yet, or there is very little of it at all, under £500 and a few times a month. In both cases the build costs more than it saves today.
- What is the actual difference between a no-code platform and n8n?
- Zapier and Make charge per task past the free tier, and the build lives inside their editor. n8n is open source and self-hosted: more setup, no per-task fee, and room for logic a drag-and-drop tool cannot express.
- When does it say Cadral, rather than a tool?
- Only when the work genuinely needs judgement, not just rules, and it happens often enough, with a real budget behind it. That combination usually means an AI-assisted build rather than a platform subscription, and that is the work we do.
- Can the answer change if we pick differently?
- Yes. Go back to any question and change it. The result screen recaps exactly which four answers produced the answer given.
Still not sure which one
Four questions cover the common cases. A real conversation covers the edge cases, in twenty minutes.
Ran your numbers? Send us the figures and we will come back with a fixed price, or book twenty minutes and talk them through.
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