Savings Rates
Savings Rates is where you tune the numbers behind estimated savings—the dollar figure that says how much manual work your automations replaced. The estimate is built from two things: how long a task takes a person by hand, and what an hour of that person's time costs. This page owns the first of those.
The estimate starts from a shared catalog of rates that is maintained centrally, and you inherit every rate in it without doing anything. This page exists for the cases where an inherited number is wrong for your team—the release valve for "that estimate is too high for us". Overriding is optional, and you only override the rates you disagree with.
The page
The page is split in two: a left rail listing rates, and a form on the right for the one you have selected.
The left rail has two lists.
- Global Rates—every rate in the shared catalog you have not overridden. Clicking one starts a new override for it.
- Your Overrides—the rates you have already overridden. Clicking one opens it for editing.
Until you pick something, the right pane simply reads Select a global rate to override.
Writing an override
An override carries only what differs. Which task it applies to is fixed by the rate you clicked—shown at the top of the form, read-only, with the inherited rate printed beneath it as a note so you can see the baseline you are departing from. Everything else about the task, including its name and the unit it is counted in, comes from the shared catalog.
Below that you choose how your rate is shaped. Three shapes are available, and each is a statement about how the manual time grows with the amount of work.
| Rate | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Flat (minutes per unit) | A fixed number of minutes for every unit. | Doubling the amount of work doubles the manual time—publishing an item, posting a comment. |
| Tiered (base + marginal) | The first unit costs a setup figure, and each unit after it costs less. | The first item carries one-time overhead the rest do not—"first platform 30 minutes, each additional 10". |
| Stepped (volume breakpoints) | A list of volume thresholds, each with its own per-unit rate. The whole amount is priced at the rate of the bracket it lands in. | Effort per unit drops at scale—per-word effort on a long piece. |
Save, and the override applies immediately. Estimated savings are priced afresh every time they are read rather than frozen when a run happened, so changing a rate here reprices existing history too—the Dashboard's figure moves the next time you load it.
Removing an override returns you to the shared rate.
What else feeds the estimate
The hourly cost of a person doing the work by hand is a single number, set on the Settings page rather than here. Leave it blank and the platform's own conservative default applies. Rates on this page say how many minutes a task takes; the hourly cost is what turns those minutes into dollars.
Where the figure appears: as the Estimated Savings card on the Dashboard, and as Est. Savings on an individual run. Both are hidden entirely when estimated savings have been turned off.
The shared catalog
The catalog these rates are inherited from is maintained in the CMS Admin area, as Estimated Savings Catalog—not in the automation navigation, because it is answered once for the whole system rather than per workspace. It groups its entries into Needs Pricing, which are tasks that have been observed but never priced, and Priced. You do not edit it; you override it from this page.
See also
- Dashboard—where the estimated savings figure is shown, and the metered AI cost it is set against.