What this costs, and what moves it.

Three stages, three shapes of number.

A fixed fee, a range and a monthly charge are not comparable, so this says which is which before it says how much. You can stop after any one of them. Nothing here is a subscription. The software is built once, for you, and it is yours: the monthly line pays for keeping it running, not for the right to use it.

1. 01

   Understand

   An operations map and a costed shortlist

   Shape

   Fixed fee

   Figure

   £4,500

   Time

   Three weeks

   The same work whatever gets built afterwards, so it is the same price whoever you are. We embed with the people doing the job and map how it really happens, including the parts that never made it into the process document. You keep the map whether or not you build with us, and it is yours to take to somebody else. If you do build with us, this fee comes off your first build invoice, so paying to look first costs you nothing if you go ahead.

2. 02

   Build

   Working software, in your environment

   Shape

   Range, fixed per increment

   Figure

   £10k to £60k and up

   Time

   Set by scope, see below

   Quoted against a boundary agreed in writing before anything is built, and billed per increment you can evaluate. If the boundary moves, the quote moves and you see it move. There is no twelve-month programme with a reveal at the end.

3. 03

   Operate

   Handover, runbooks and a support line

   Shape

   Monthly

   Figure

   From £1,500

   Time

   Rolling monthly, 30 days notice

   This is not a licence and it is not a subscription. The software runs on your accounts, in your environment, and the copyright in what we build for you transfers to you as each increment is paid for. This line is what it costs to keep it running and to keep us accountable for it: monitoring, updates, re-testing, and a named person on a support line. Stop paying it and you lose those. You do not lose the software. There is no minimum term and no exit fee. It is quoted in the first budget rather than appearing in year two as spending nobody planned for, which is the most common way an automation project ends up costing more than it was sold for.

   • Re-tested on every model change, every prompt change, and any measured drop in quality, and at minimum once a quarter whether or not anything changed. You get the result either way.
   • Watching the model bill is part of this: usage caps, alerts, and a monthly figure you can check against the provider’s own console.

Each stage is invoiced in advance and payable within fourteen days. The build is invoiced increment by increment rather than as one sum at the end.

How much of the business is in scope.

Pick the line that matches what you already have, not the one that matches your ambition. These bands qualify the build stage only: the first stage costs the same whatever follows it, and the third is a running cost rather than a project.

The written list of what it may do, testing on your own past cases and sign-off by a named person are in the smallest of these and stay in all three, as are the audit trail and the defined failure behaviour. A smaller budget does not buy less care, and evaluation carries on for as long as the system runs whichever line you are on.

What is deliberately not in any of them is the handover, the runbooks, the support line and the operations map. Those are the first and third stages above, and listing them here as well would be charging for the same thing twice on one page. It is the exact fault the next section but one tells you to look for in anybody's quote, including ours.

Nine decisions, before anyone writes a quote.

Every one of these is settled in the first stage, which is why the first stage is a fixed fee and the second is a range. Several of them say plainly that a cheaper answer exists.

01How wide the authority is

An agent that drafts and an agent that files are not the same product. The more it may do without asking, the more has to be proved before it is allowed to, and proving is the work. A narrower authority is cheaper, and is often the right answer for a first build.

02How many approval gates, and who staffs them

Every irreversible action queues for a named human. That is a screen to build, a queue somebody has to actually watch, and a change to how that person spends their day. The last of those three is the one usually left out of a quote.

03How many systems it has to touch

Each integration brings its own authentication, its own rate limits and its own failure mode. Two systems is not twice the cost of one, because the interesting part is what happens when one of them is down and the other is not.

04Whether the decisions were ever written down

If the rules live only in the people doing the job, the first work is recovering them, and that is what the Understand stage is for. An operation with a current, accurate process document is genuinely cheaper to automate.

05How exceptional the process is

A process with more exceptions than rules costs more than one with a clean path, because the exceptions are the work rather than an edge case at the end of it. This is usually the largest single difference between two operations that look similar from outside.

06What counts as evidence

Agents are measured against real cases before they touch production. Who supplies those cases, how many there are, and who decides whether the answer was right, is an effort line of its own. It is also the line worth protecting when a budget is cut.

07What the audit has to satisfy

An internal review and a file a regulator will read are different documents with different costs. Tell us which one you need at the start; retrofitting the second onto the first is more expensive than building it once.

08Who operates it afterwards

Your team running it needs runbooks and training, which is a one-off. Us running it is a recurring line. Both are legitimate and they are priced differently, so the decision belongs in the first conversation rather than the last.

09What happens when it is wrong

Rollback, escalation and the people at the other end of it are part of the build. A quote that does not price them has not priced the system, only the happy path.

Six things worth insisting on, including from us.

Take this list to two other suppliers. If we lose on these terms we were the wrong answer, and you will have found that out for the price of an afternoon rather than a year.

A quote with lines in it

If it does not show what each part costs, it is not a quote you can compare. One number for a whole programme is a number you cannot argue with, which is usually the point.

The exclusions in writing

What is out of scope matters more than what is in it, because that is where the second invoice comes from. Ask for the list before you sign, not after.

The running cost in the first budget

Maintenance, monitoring and the licence bill do not disappear when they go unmentioned. They stay invisible through year one and arrive in year two.

The authority written down before the build

What the agent may and may not do should be a document you have read and agreed, not a paragraph discovered inside a prompt after go-live.

A named person on every irreversible action

Not a role, not a team inbox. A person, agreed in advance, who is expected to be there.

Whatever you paid for, even if you stop

You paid for the map. It should be yours to take elsewhere. That is true of our first stage and it is a fair thing to ask of anyone.

What is outside the number.

Listed here rather than discovered later. Each of these is something a buyer reasonably assumes is covered, and each one has caused an argument in somebody's project.

• Model and API usage
• Licences for the systems we integrate with
• Hosting, domains and cloud spend
• App store developer accounts
• Hardware

You hold the model provider account in your own name and pay OpenAI, Anthropic or Google directly at their published rates. Nothing is marked up on the way through us, and we size the likely monthly bill during Understand so it is in the first budget. The store accounts are 99 USD a year for Apple and 25 USD once for Google.

Anything outside the agreed boundary is quoted separately rather than absorbed quietly. That cuts both ways: it is also why the boundary is written down before anything is built.