Hire a virtual assistant, set up Zapier yourself, or pay someone to build it?

Hire a virtual assistant when the work needs judgment and changes every week. If the job is a couple of steps between two apps, set up Zapier yourself. Pay someone to build it when the same work keeps coming back and nobody on your team has time to set it up properly.

A virtual assistant (VA) is a person who works for you remotely, usually paid by the hour or for a block of hours each month. Zapier and Make are tools that pass information between your apps when something happens, like a new form entry or an email arriving. A done-for-you build is the same kind of automation, often with AI reading and sorting things, set up by someone else and handed over to you.

Side by side

At a glance	Virtual assistant	Do it yourself	Someone builds it
Typical cost	U.S.-based VAs: $1,200 to $3,000 a month for part-time help (BELAY). Time etc: plans from $390 a month.	Zapier: free for 100 tasks a month, paid plans from $19.99 a month, plus your own time.	With us, $1,500 per workflow, plus the monthly cost of the tools it runs on.
Getting started	Finding the right person, then showing them how you work.	An afternoon for a two-step job. Longer once there are exceptions to handle.	A few weeks for one workflow with us.
Good at	Phone calls, judgment calls, one-off errands, work that changes week to week.	Predictable hand-offs, like a form entry becoming a spreadsheet row.	Repeating work that varies a little each time, where AI reads and sorts and a person approves.
Where it falls short	You pay for every hour, including the repetitive ones, and the know-how leaves when they do.	It can fail quietly when an app changes or a message arrives in an odd format, and fixing it is on you.	It costs more upfront and does only the job it was built for.

When a virtual assistant is the better choice

The work changes every day: juggling calendars, chasing people by phone, booking travel.
Customers need to talk to a person in real time.
There isn’t much of it. If a task takes one hour a week, paying someone for that hour costs less than a build.

When doing it yourself is enough

The job has one or two steps, like a new sale posting a message to your team chat.
You like setting these things up, and you’ll be around when one breaks.
Zapier’s free plan covers 100 tasks a month. A task is roughly one action it takes for you, so that’s plenty to find out whether the idea works.

When it’s worth paying someone to build it

The same work comes in every week, but each one is a little different: inquiries, briefs, order forms, status updates scattered across tools.
A mistake would cost you, so you want a person to check before anything goes out.
You tried the do-it-yourself version and it keeps tripping over the odd cases.
Nobody in the business has the time to build it and keep it running.

You can also mix them. Automation sorts and drafts, and a VA or someone on your staff approves the drafts and handles the exceptions.

Weighing a specific service? We’ve put ourselves side by side with BELAY, Time etc, Wing Assistant, Smith.ai and Ruby.

What it costs with us

A build is $1,500 per workflow, or $1,000 for our first few clients in exchange for a case study. The tools it runs on bill you directly. The pricing page has the details. If you’re not sure which of the three fits, the intro call is free and we’ll tell you, even when the answer is a VA.

Sources

Prices checked 18 Oct 2026.

Updated 18 Oct 2026

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