We publish our rate card because pricing opacity wastes everyone's time. What follows is what we actually charge. If your engagement does not fit one of these shapes, say so and we will quote it properly rather than force it into a tier.
The right commercial model depends on how well the problem is understood at the start. Well-defined work should be fixed price — the risk belongs with us. Genuinely exploratory work should not be, because a fixed price on an unknown is just a padded estimate with extra steps.
| Model | Best for | Commitment |
|---|---|---|
| Fixed Price | Well-specified deliverables with a clear acceptance test — audits, due diligence, defined build phases. | Scope locked, price locked |
| Milestone | Larger builds where the shape is known but the detail emerges. Each milestone is separately priced and accepted. | Phase by phase |
| Retained | Ongoing capacity — fractional CTO, embedded engineering, continuous platform work. | Rolling monthly, 3-month minimum |
| Day Rate | Exploratory or advisory work, incident response, and anything where scope genuinely cannot be pinned down. | None beyond booked days |
// We prefer fixed price and milestone engagements. If we can define your work well enough to price it that way, we will — it aligns our incentives with your outcome rather than our utilisation.
Neither requires a long-term commitment, and both are credited against a larger engagement if you go on to one.
Credited in full against any engagement commissioned within 60 days of the report.
Hours are credited against any engagement started within 30 days.
For teams that need judgement rather than headcount — someone accountable for the technical decisions, present enough to make them well.
// Three-month minimum term on all tiers, rolling monthly thereafter with 30 days' notice. Billed monthly in advance. Tiers can be moved up or down at any renewal point.
| Role | Monthly |
|---|---|
| Software Engineer | £9,500 |
| Embedded / Firmware Engineer | £11,000 |
| DevOps / Platform Engineer | £11,500 |
| Senior Software Engineer | £13,000 |
| Security Engineer | £13,500 |
| AI / ML Engineer | £15,500 |
// Three-month minimum term. Teams of three or more include a technical lead at no additional cost. Volume discounts from four engineers upward — ask for a quote.
| Role | Day | Half Day |
|---|---|---|
| Software Engineer | £650 | £390 |
| Embedded / Firmware Engineer | £750 | £450 |
| DevOps / Platform Engineer | £750 | £450 |
| Hardware / PCB Engineer | £800 | £480 |
| Security Engineer | £900 | £540 |
| AI / ML Engineer | £975 | £585 |
| Principal Engineer / Technical Director | £1,250 | £750 |
// Regulated or accredited work (defence, medical, financial services) carries a 20% surcharge to cover clearance, documentation and audit overhead. Ten or more days booked together: 10% discount.
We manufacture prototype boards in-house. That removes the single most common source of delay in hardware projects — the two-week round trip to an external fab, repeated for every revision, each one a fortnight you cannot get back.
A revision that would normally cost you ten working days costs an afternoon. It changes how you develop: you stop batching changes to save fab runs and start iterating the way you would with software.
| Item | Rate |
|---|---|
| Design setupper board revision | £450 |
| Machine timeper hour, milling and drilling | £85 |
| Same-day expeditesurcharge on setup and machine time | +35% |
| Assemblyper board, hand-placed | £120 |
| Rework / modificationper hour | £95 |
// Two-layer boards only. Components at cost plus 10% handling.
| Engagement | Scope | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Essential Review | Single application or service, architecture and dependency risk | £2,500 |
| Application Security Audit | Threat model, code review, authenticated testing, remediation plan | £6,500 |
| Infrastructure & Cloud Audit | Network, identity, secrets, build chain and deployment posture | £7,500 |
| Full Platform Audit | Application, infrastructure, process and supply chain, end to end | £14,000 |
| Pre-Investment Technical DD | Codebase, team, roadmap credibility and cost-to-deliver appraisal | £3,500 |
// All audits include a written report and a live debrief. Remediation work, if you want us to do it, is quoted separately and never bundled into the audit price.
| Engagement | Scope | Price |
|---|---|---|
| AI Feasibility Sprint | Two weeks to a defensible yes or no, with the evidence behind it | £4,500 |
| Model Evaluation & Benchmarking | Task-specific eval harness, baseline comparison, cost modelling | £7,500 |
| Production RAG / LLM Build | Retrieval, orchestration, evaluation and monitoring, deployed | from £18,000 |
| Edge Inference Deployment | Quantisation, hardware selection, on-device pipeline and tooling | from £22,000 |
| Retained ML Engineer | Ongoing model, data and evaluation ownership | £13,500 / mo |
// Model and infrastructure costs are passed through at cost. We will tell you what your inference bill looks like at scale before you commit to an architecture.
Because the alternative wastes a week of everyone's time. If our rates do not work for your budget, you should be able to establish that in ninety seconds rather than after three calls and a proposal.
We absorb it. That is what fixed price means, and it is why we are careful about which work we accept on that basis. If the scope changes, that is a different conversation and a separately priced change — but our own estimation errors are ours.
Frequently. The advisory hour and the feasibility sprint exist precisely for teams who need senior input without a retained commitment. We will also tell you when the honest answer is to hire rather than to engage us.
The engineers you meet during scoping. We do not staff engagements with people you have never spoken to, and we do not subcontract delivery without telling you in advance and in writing.
Usually. We work regularly in regulated and accredited environments, including air-gapped development and client-supplied hardware. The 20% regulated-work surcharge covers the clearance and documentation overhead that comes with it.
Book an advisory hour. Bring the proposal, the architecture diagram or the vendor quote you are unsure about. Plenty of those conversations end with us telling you that your existing plan is sound.
Describe the problem and we will tell you which model fits, what it is likely to cost, and whether we are the right people for it.
