I’ve automated things where the breakeven will occur decades from now. It was fun though, the chance of errors is decreased, and I learned a bunch of new stuff.

Sometimes it’s about the journey and not the destination.

Calculating breakeven ROI is part of the push from a lot of companies to start citizen developer initiatives.

The point being that the "I" is also flexible -- an existing employee fooling around to learn automation whenever they have downtime is much cheaper than hiring a consultant.

Sure, the automation is worse and delivered more slowly. But you can get automations from a lot of people in parallel, plus you're upskilling your workforce.