Three ways to work together. One price before we start.
Scope and price are agreed in writing before any work begins. You will never open an invoice you weren’t expecting.
Find out what you've gotAssessment, one to two weeks
We talk to the people doing the work, map every system you run and how they connect, and put a number on the manual effort. You get a written report, a costed and prioritised plan, and a plain answer on where AI would pay in your business and where it wouldn't. Yours to keep, whether or not you hire us for the next step.
Build what you needFixed-price project, typically 4 to 12 weeks
Internal tools, connecting two systems that don't talk, reporting that currently takes a day by hand, or replacing the application nobody maintains any more. Fixed scope, fixed price, billed at milestones. Delivered running, documented, with your people trained on it.
Keep it runningMonthly agreement
Somebody is finally responsible for the software. We look after the application and the infrastructure it runs on: updates, backups, monitoring, fixes, and changes as they come up. Same number every month, answered by the next business day.
Something that doesn't fit theseBespoke engagement
A longer build, a system that has to stay live while it is replaced, a mix of the three above, or a situation none of them describes. The structure here is a starting point, not a rule. Tell us what you actually need and we will shape an engagement around it, with the price agreed before work starts, same as everything else.
Prices are published on purpose. If a number here rules us out, you have saved yourself a meeting. If it doesn’t, you already know roughly what you are looking at before you write to us. And if your situation isn’t on this sheet at all, say so. We are open to that conversation.
Find out what you've got$3,500–$7,500
For a business that knows something is wrong but not exactly what, or how much it is costing.
We talk to the people doing the work, map every system you run and how they connect, and put a number on the manual effort. You get a written report, a costed and prioritised plan, and a plain answer on where AI would pay in your business and where it wouldn't. Yours to keep, whether or not you hire us for the next step.
The report is yours. Take it to another firm if you like. Most people don’t, but the option is what makes the price fair.
What you get
- An inventory of every system you run, who uses it, and how the data moves between them.
- Where the manual effort is going, and what that costs you in wages every year.
- What is fragile, unsupported, unbacked-up, or a security problem, in plain language.
- A prioritised plan with a fixed price against each step, so you can decide with numbers instead of a feeling.
- A plain-language read on AI: where it would genuinely pay in your business, where it would not, and what the cheaper fix is where one exists.
Build what you need$5,000–$75,000
For a problem that is already understood, or one the assessment has just put a number on.
Internal tools, connecting two systems that don't talk, reporting that currently takes a day by hand, or replacing the application nobody maintains any more. Fixed scope, fixed price, billed at milestones. Delivered running, documented, with your people trained on it.
Every project ends with a conversation about keeping it running. Not a pitch, a handover plan, because software with nobody responsible for it does not stay working.
What you get
- A written scope, fixed price and milestone schedule agreed before anything is built.
- Working software, deployed to accounts you own, with documentation your next person can follow.
- Your people trained on it, on site where that makes sense.
- Written acceptance criteria, and change control: if the scope moves, you approve a revised price before we continue.
Keep it runningFrom $1,500/mo
For software that matters to the business and currently has nobody responsible for it.
Somebody is finally responsible for the software. We look after the application and the infrastructure it runs on: updates, backups, monitoring, fixes, and changes as they come up. Same number every month, answered by the next business day.
Priced on coverage and response, not on a meter. Same number every month. Three-month minimum, then month to month on 30 days’ notice, and you keep everything if you leave.
What you get
- Monitoring that tells us something is wrong before a customer tells you.
- Backups that are actually tested, security patching, and the updates nobody gets round to.
- Fixes when something breaks, and changes and small improvements as your business shifts.
- A standing answer to “who do we ask about this?”, during business hours, by the next business day.
Essential
Monitoring, backups, security patching, and fixing things when they break, covering the application and the infrastructure under it. Answered by the next business day.
StandardMost businesses land here
Everything in Essential, plus changes and small improvements as you need them, and a monthly conversation about what is coming next.
Extended
Everything in Standard, with priority scheduling and room for larger pieces of work inside the month.
Every tier answers by the next business day, during business hours. Unused capacity is reserved for you, not banked.
Ask which tier fitsEvery engagement, whichever one you choose.
Fixed price, never hourly.
An hourly meter rewards us for being slow, which is a strange thing to ask you to agree to. You know the number before we start.
Milestone billing, deposit up front.
You pay as things are delivered, and you can see what you are paying for. No lump sum for a promise.
You own what we build.
Code, documentation, accounts, infrastructure — yours on full payment. Where our own tooling sits underneath it, you get a permanent licence to that too, so nothing stops you taking the work to someone else.
No account layer.
Whoever scopes the work leads it and answers for it. Specialists work under that lead, never instead of it. You will never explain your problem twice to two different people.
A limited number of clients at once.
On purpose. Two well-run projects beat four badly-run ones, and you deserve to be one of the two.
An honest no.
If off-the-shelf software would do, or you need a different kind of firm, we’ll say so on the first call and point you there.
Questions people ask before they sign.
What if the scope changes halfway through?
It usually does, a little. Every project has written acceptance criteria and a change-control step: when the scope moves, you get a revised price to approve before we continue. You never find out about a change on the invoice.
What happens if we stop the retainer?
Thirty days’ notice after the first three months. Everything stays yours: code, documentation, accounts, servers. It keeps running. We built it that way on purpose, because a client who can leave easily is a client who stays for the right reasons.
We already have an IT person. Do you work with them?
Gladly. IT keeps the computers, the network and the accounts running; we build and run the software the business depends on. The two jobs meet often and rarely overlap. Plenty of our referrals go in both directions.
How fast do you respond?
By the next business day, during business hours, for every tier. We don’t offer an overnight emergency line. If your business needs one, you need a managed service provider, and we’d rather tell you that now than miss a call at two in the morning.
Can you help us make sense of AI?
Yes, and that is part of the job. Nerdy Ventures has built with these tools in production, so we can tell you in plain language what they would actually do for your business and what they would cost to run. It genuinely pays for pulling structure out of documents somebody re-types by hand, sorting inbound work, and finding patterns in data too big to eyeball. For most other things the boring approach is cheaper and more reliable, and we’ll say so instead of selling you a pilot.
Our situation doesn’t fit any of these.
Then say so. The three offerings cover most of what we see, but a longer programme of work, a system that has to keep running while it is replaced, or something that mixes all three is a normal conversation, not an exception. We will shape the engagement to fit, and the price is still agreed in writing before anything starts.
Why not just hire someone?
Sometimes that is exactly right, and we’ll say so. But a salary buys two thousand hours a year whether or not there is two thousand hours of work, hiring takes months and a recruiter, and it leaves you managing an engineer, which is usually the real reason the role is still open. A retainer ends on thirty days’ notice. A bad hire costs a year.
What we don’t do.
No help desk, no desktop support, no network administration, no printer triage. That is a real discipline and a genuinely useful one. It is simply not this one. If you need that side as well, we can point you at people who do it well.
No overnight or weekend emergency line, and no staff augmentation. We answer by the next business day, and we’d rather tell you that now than promise otherwise and let you down when it matters.
Free, no deck, and you leave with a straight answer about whether we can help.