Part of: How to make money with AI — see all 6 income models
Run an AI automation consultancy with Make.com + Claude and earn $800–$2,000 per project
By Shaun·Co-founder
Find small businesses doing things manually that AI can automate, build the solution in Make.com without coding, and charge $800–$2,000 per setup.
What you'll ship
- A polished demo automation running live in Make.com
- A 90-second Loom walkthrough and written pitch ready to send
- Your first paid project closed at $800+ minimum
Earning potential
$800–$5,000
per month · per track · passive
Earnings disclaimer: Ranges are illustrative, not guaranteed. Individual results vary based on niche, effort, market conditions, and execution. Most readers should expect to start at the lower end while building experience.
Step 01 · 30 min
Pick 2–3 profitable niches to target
The most profitable Make.com clients are small businesses manually doing things that obviously shouldn't be manual: copying data between apps, sending the same email types every week, routing leads from forms to CRMs, updating spreadsheets from form fills, or posting scheduled content across platforms.
Three niches that pay consistently: real estate agencies (lead routing → CRM → SMS follow-up → agent notification), e-commerce brands (order notifications → inventory alerts → abandoned cart sequences → supplier updates), marketing agencies (client reporting → social scheduling → approval workflows → delivery notifications).
Use Claude: *"I'm offering Make.com AI automation consulting for [niche]. List the 5 most common manual tasks they do that could be automated. For each, estimate the hours per week saved and what they'd reasonably pay for a one-time setup."*
Pro tip
Pick a niche you already know something about. Your first sales call goes 10× better when you can say 'I know real estate agencies typically use [CRM] and spend 3 hours per week on [task]' — the prospect feels understood immediately.
Step 02 · 1–2 hrs
Build a free demo automation in Make.com
Build one polished demo workflow before doing any outreach. This is your sales asset — buyers need to see automation happen, not hear it described. A strong real estate demo: new lead fills out Typeform → Create contact in HubSpot → Send instant SMS to lead via Twilio → Add task to Notion for the agent → Post Slack notification to the team. Five nodes, 90 minutes to build, genuinely useful.
Create a free account at [Make.com](https://www.make.com). The free tier allows 1,000 operations/month — more than enough to demo and deliver small projects. You can expense the paid plan ($9–$16/mo) once you have a client covering costs.
Record a 90-second Loom screen recording of the automation running live: trigger the webhook, watch each module execute in real time, show the outputs appearing in Slack and HubSpot. This video is the most important asset you'll create in this playbook.
Step 03 · 30 min
Build your offer and pricing
Don't sell 'automation consulting'. Sell a specific outcome at a fixed price: 'Lead routing automation for real estate agencies — $800, set up in 3 days, includes 30-day support' or 'E-commerce order notification system — $1,200 flat fee'.
Pricing anchor: time saved × hourly cost of the person doing it manually. If an admin spends 8 hrs/week on a task at $20/hr, that's $640/mo in saved time. Charging $800–$1,200 for a one-time setup is an obvious ROI argument — you're cheaper than one month of manual labor.
Use Claude to write a one-page pitch document: *"Create a simple one-page service description for a Make.com automation consultant targeting [niche]. Include: the problem being solved, what's automated, what's included, timeline, pricing, and 2 expected outcomes. Clear, professional, specific."*
Pro tip
Offer a 'Starter' package ($500) and a 'Full Setup' package ($1,200). Most clients choose the middle — but the Starter gets the conversation started for price-sensitive prospects.
Step 04 · 2 hrs
Find your first target clients
The fastest prospecting signal: companies posting job ads for 'data entry coordinator', 'marketing assistant', or 'operations assistant'. These businesses are openly telling you they have manual processes they haven't automated. Find them on LinkedIn Jobs filtered by your target niche.
Send connection requests with a specific message: *"I noticed [company] is hiring for a [role] to handle [task] — I help [niche] businesses automate these workflows with Make.com for less than one month of that hire's salary. Here's a 90-second demo: [Loom link]. Worth a 15-minute call?"*
Alternatively, post in niche Facebook groups or subreddits: 'Built a Make.com automation for [niche] that handles [task] automatically — happy to share a demo if anyone's struggling with this.' Replies are warm inbound leads. Aim for 20 outreach messages over 3 days.
Step 05 · Varies
Run a free 30-minute audit call to close
Your call structure: 15 minutes asking questions (what tools do you use, what manual tasks take the most time, where do things fall through the cracks), 10 minutes demoing your most relevant automation, 5 minutes proposing a specific project.
Don't quote a price on the call. Say: 'Based on what you've told me, I can scope this and send a proposal tomorrow.' This gives you time to price correctly and shows professionalism. Use Claude to draft the proposal: *"Based on this client brief: [paste notes], write a 1-page project proposal including scope, timeline, price, and what's included. Tone: professional and specific."*
Close rate for warm outreach demo calls is 30–50% if you've asked good questions in the first 15 minutes. The audit format creates trust — the client feels understood, not sold to.
Step 06 · 4–8 hrs
Deliver your first project
Use Claude to map the full workflow before building: *"I'm building a Make.com automation that [description]. Help me identify all the edge cases, error states, and data transformations I need to handle before I start building."*
Build it, test it with real data from the client's environment, and document it in a 1-page Notion doc: what each module does, what to do if X breaks, how to reach you. Deliver before your quoted deadline. Add one small thing they didn't ask for but obviously needed — like a 'send summary email at end of day' trigger. These gestures create referrals.
At $1,000 per project with 4–8 hours of work, your effective rate is $125–$250/hr — significantly higher than most freelance platforms. The premium comes from outcome pricing rather than hourly billing.
Pro tip
Document your Make.com scenarios as JSON exports. Your second project in the same niche uses your first as a starting template — cutting build time in half.
Step 07 · Ongoing
Turn projects into retainers
The retainer pitch: after delivery, propose a maintenance retainer: *"Happy to monitor the automations month-to-month, fix anything that breaks as your tools update their APIs, and add small improvements when your workflow changes — $300–$500/mo."* Most clients accept — they don't want to manage Make.com themselves, and API changes do break scenarios occasionally.
Five clients on $350/mo retainers = $1,750/mo baseline before any new projects. Add one new project per month at $1,000 and you're at $2,750/mo from part-time consulting.
The ceiling-raising move: build a productized service — a fixed-scope automation package at a fixed price for a specific niche. 'The Real Estate Lead Machine — $1,500, live in 5 days' is easier to sell, deliver, and scale than custom-scope consulting. Once you've delivered the same automation 3 times, productize it.
Frequently asked questions
Bottom line
Ship it.
Make.com automation consulting has the fastest path to $1,000 of any technical side income in this playbook library. You don't need to code, you don't need to build a product, and you don't need an audience — you need one working demo, 20 outreach messages, and one client who says yes. The market is enormous: most small businesses are drowning in manual processes they know could be automated, but don't know how. You're the bridge. Build the demo, send the Loom, run the audit call.
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