Pricing

What it costs, in public

Most UK AI consultancies will not quote until they have worked out what you can afford. We would rather you knew before the first call, so here are the numbers.

AI readiness assessment

A structured review of your data, systems, controls and people, ending in a ranked list of AI opportunities with costs, risks and a build order.

From £4,500 2-3 weeks

What is included

Kickoff workshop and four to six stakeholder interviews
Inventory of AI already in use, including embedded tooling
Data classification table and deployment tier recommendation
Ranked opportunity list with effort, cost and benefit estimates
Risk register entries with proposed owners and controls
Written report and a working session to argue with it

Full service details

Private, self-hosted & air-gapped AI

Open-weight models on your own infrastructure or in a UK region you control, up to fully air-gapped on NVIDIA DGX or HGX B300, hardened to DISA STIG and CIS Level 2.

From £18,000 4-8 weeks

What is included

Deployment tier analysis with a five-year cost model
Model selection tested against your own evaluation set
Deployment to your infrastructure or UK region, as code
Monitoring, structured logging and alerting
Written data residency and processing position
Runbook, handover sessions and a documented exit plan

Full service details

AI implementation

Retrieval over your documents, agents that complete real work, and automation wired into the systems you already run, built to be handed over, not rented back to you.

From £25,000 6-12 weeks

What is included

Scope, boundary and evaluation set agreed in weeks one and two
Build with fortnightly review against measured accuracy
Integration with your existing systems and identity provider
Per-user permission enforcement resolved at query time
Automated tests, CI pipeline and deployment scripts
Documentation, runbook, handover and a defined support period

Full service details

AI governance & compliance

The policies, registers and evidence trail that let you say yes to AI, and prove to a regulator, auditor or procurement panel exactly how it is controlled.

From £7,500 3-6 weeks

What is included

Complete AI inventory including unapproved and embedded tools
AI policy drafted with the people who have to operate it
AI-specific risk register entries with owners and controls
DPIA templates plus completed DPIAs for systems in scope
EU AI Act scope determination and Article 5 screening
DSIT AIME self-assessment and ISO/IEC 42001 gap analysis

Full service details

Context

Where we sit in the UK market

For reference, the 2026 UK market broadly looks like this. We are in the boutique band, and we think that is the right place for regulated delivery work.

Supplier type	Typical day rate	Typical project	What you are buying
Independent consultant	£600-£1,200	£2,500-£25,000	One experienced person, fast, no delivery capacity
Boutique / specialist us	£1,000-£1,800	£25,000-£150,000	Senior people on the actual work, engineering and governance together
Large consultancy / SI	£1,500-£3,000+	£250,000+	Scale, brand assurance, procurement acceptability

None of these bands is inherently better. If you need forty people mobilised next month, the third row is the correct answer and we will say so. We wrote up the whole market in more detail, including where the money usually gets wasted.

Pricing questions

Why publish prices when almost nobody else does?

Because a fee that varies with what the client appears able to pay is not a fee, it is a negotiation, and because the first meeting is more useful when both sides already know whether the numbers are in the same range. If our figures are wrong for you, you have found that out for free.

Is it really fixed fee?

Yes, wherever scope can be fixed, which is most of the time, and always after an assessment. The scope is written down before we start, and if you change it we re-quote rather than quietly billing extra. Where scope genuinely cannot be fixed, we propose a short paid discovery to get to something we can quote, rather than quoting a number we would have to revise upwards.

What is not included?

Infrastructure and licence costs are yours and are paid to your suppliers directly, not marked up through us. Travel outside the North East is charged at cost where on-site presence is needed. Anything requiring specialist legal, clinical safety or sector regulatory input is brought in and quoted separately, with our recommendation.

Do you do day rates?

For advisory retainers and ad-hoc work, yes, from £1,200 per day. For defined pieces of work we prefer fixed fee, because a day rate rewards taking longer and we would rather our incentive matched yours.

Do you work with small organisations?

Yes, though the assessment is the sensible entry point rather than a build. If your budget is materially below these figures, say so on the first call: we will either scope something smaller that is genuinely useful, or tell you honestly that you would be better served elsewhere.

What about ongoing support after handover?

Optional, from £1,800 per month, covering escalation, periodic model review and re-evaluation as your corpus changes. It is deliberately optional: if the system only runs while you are paying us a retainer, we have not handed it over properly.

Not sure which one you need?

That is a normal position to be in, and it is what the first call is for. Describe the problem and we will tell you which of these, if any, actually fits.

Book an intro call See our approach