The Cost of Work Index
About
Per-unit cost of 13 back-office tasks, person vs software, in the US, Greece and Ukraine, with cited sources. Bundled data, offline.
Details
- Author
- kindrat86
- Categories
- Finance, Other
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Setup
Install The Cost of Work Index in your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, and others).
Repository: https://github.com/kindrat86/cost-of-work-index
Follow the installation instructions in the repository README, then restart your MCP client.
Per-unit human labour cost vs. AI-employee cost across 13 back-office tasks in three markets (United States, Greece, Ukraine). A small, fully-sourced dataset published under CC BY 4.0, with an MIT-licensed MCP server.
For each task ("enter a supplier invoice", "chase an overdue invoice", "screen one candidate") the dataset records two numbers:
- Human cost per unit: the published hourly labour cost for that market, divided by the human minutes the task takes.
- AI cost per unit: the advertised per-unit price of the matching Nika AI employee.
Themultipleis the ratio of the two. A multiple above 1 means the AI employee is cheaper per unit; below 1 means a person is cheaper.
- 3 markets: United States (USD), Greece (EUR), Ukraine (UAH)
- 13 tasksacross back-office functions (bookkeeping, scheduling, support, collections, quoting, candidate screening)
- 39 human-vs-AI cost comparisons(13 tasks × 3 markets)
- 3 hourly labour cost figures, one per market
The dataset is explicit about which figures are statistics and which are estimates:
- Cited: carries a publisher, a resolvable URL, a reference period, and a retrieval date. The three hourly labour costs are cited from BLS, Eurostat, and Derzhstat.
- Estimate: the human-minutes-per-unit figures are Nika's own estimates, labelled as such and documented with their written basis per task.
- humanMinutesPerUnitis a Nika estimate, not an official statistic. Its basis is stated per task inhumanMinutesBasis.
- Hourly labour costs are not like-for-like across markets: the US and Ukraine figures are gross wage only, while the Greek figure is fully loaded and already includes employer contributions.
- For some tasks in some markets a person is cheaper per unit than the AI employee. Those rows are real and are not filtered out. Checkmultiple.
- Employees markedwaitlistare not yet running. Their per-unit price is the advertised price, not a measured one.
- Code (src/,Dockerfile): MIT. SeeLICENSE.
- Data (data/):CC BY 4.0: free to use and cite with attribution.
Nika (hirenika.com). The Cost of Work Index, version 2026.3, 2026-08-04.https://hirenika.com/cost-of-work
- data/cost-of-work-2026.3.json: full dataset (tasks, markets, sources, caveats)
- data/cost-of-work-2026.3.csv: tabular export
- The canonical page, with full methodology, per-row bases, and live figures:https://hirenika.com/cost-of-work
- Machine-readable REST API (no key, CORS open):https://hirenika.com/api/v1/cost-of-work
- Nika, the AI employees behind the per-unit pricing:https://hirenika.com
The index ships as an MCP server so agents can query it directly:
Five tools: list all tasks, get per-unit cost for a task and market, estimate monthly/annual cost from a volume, list the official sources, and export the whole index as JSON. The dataset is bundled, so the server answers offline; no API key is required. The server source lives in this repository (src/,Dockerfile), and the npm package is published from the hirenika repository where the data snapshot is generated, never hand-edited.
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