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What this costs

No day rate and no tiers. A written scope comes before any number, and the number does not move after it is agreed.

The first conversation

An hour, at a fixed USD 150. If you engage us, it comes off the first invoice in full. If you do not, you keep the write-up and we keep nothing but the hour.

consultation

Scroll to follow the fee.

It is charged because an unpriced call is a sales call, and both sides behave differently when it is not. You get the hour spent on your actual problem, and a short written answer afterwards covering what we would build, what we would refuse to build, and whether we are the right people for it at all. That answer is yours either way.

Three shapes an engagement takes

  1. Discovery

    1 to 2 weeks

    Where the decisions nobody has made yet get made. We map the sources, the permissions and the failure modes, and you leave with a written scope, an architecture, and a fixed price for the build. Priced on its own, and worth having even if the build goes to somebody else.

  2. Fixed-scope build

    6 to 8 weeks, typically

    The common shape. A written scope, a fixed price agreed before anything is built, and payment at 40% to commence, 30% on design approval, 30% on completion. Anything larger we would rather break into phases you can stop after than sell as one number.

  3. Retained engineering

    Monthly

    For systems already in production. Evaluation runs on a schedule, prompts and retrieval configs move as models move, and someone is accountable when a provider retires the version you depend on. Priced against a named allocation, not an open-ended promise.

What moves the number

The state of your material
Roughly half the AI projects we are asked about turn out to be data projects first. Records in four systems that disagree, no owner for the definition of a customer. If that is where you are, the honest quote covers fixing it, and that is usually the larger half of the number.
How wrong an answer is allowed to be
A system that drafts an internal summary and a system that posts to a ledger are different engineering problems at the same surface area. The second needs evaluation, approval gates and a rollback story, and that work is most of the difference between the two prices.
How many systems have to agree
One source and one destination is a clean build. Six, two of which have no API and one of which is a spreadsheet somebody maintains by hand, is a different project. Integration count moves a quote more reliably than model choice does.
Whether it has to run without us
Handing over code, prompts, evaluation sets and a runbook your team can operate is part of every engagement. Where you need us to also train the team that will own it, that is real time and it is quoted rather than absorbed.

Why there is no price list

A published day rate gets compared against another day rate, and the day is never the expensive part. The expensive part is the week nobody costed, where it turns out the documents need work before the model does, or that two systems disagree about who a customer is.

So we scope first and quote once. The number that comes out of discovery is the number on the invoice, and if we got the scope wrong that is our problem rather than a change request. That only works if nobody is quoting before they have looked.

Book the hour

Send a paragraph about the problem. We reply within two working days with questions and a time, and we will tell you before the call if we think it is not worth your USD 150.

Start a project