What does an engagement cost?

Owners want to know the cost before they give up an afternoon for a meeting, which is fair. This is the answer on our home page:

Engagements are custom-scoped, so there's no rate card. They are a significant investment — typically six figures annually — priced against the work the system takes over. That's exactly why we prove it first: the demo is free, and if it doesn't make the case, you shouldn't buy it.

Why there is no rate card

A rate card works when every customer buys roughly the same thing. What we build is shaped around a single job inside your business, and the same job can look very different in the business next door. Take quotes being re-keyed into invoicing. If your quotes live in a single tool with clean fields, taking that work away is a fairly contained build. If they turn up scattered across your inbox and a manager has to check them before anyone keys them into accounting software nobody has changed in years, it's a much bigger piece of work.

Pricing either of those sight unseen would mean guessing. Guess too high and you pay for work you didn't need. Guess too low and the budget ends up deciding what the system can do. So we set the price once we understand the job and how the work moves between your people and your tools.

What "typically six figures annually" means

It means an engagement is a serious commitment, and we say so up front so it doesn't surprise you later. Owners who are shopping for a cheap tool bolted onto their software are better off knowing that before they spend any time with us.

The word "annually" is there because the price is per year, for an engagement that runs over time. We scope, build, test and hand over systems in turn, starting with the system underneath the job costing you the most and moving on to the next job once that system is running.

Priced against the work the system takes over

We price against the work sitting on your people today. Think of the capable person who rebuilds the Friday report by hand, or the admin who re-types each enquiry into the job system. That work already costs you something. You pay it every week in wages, and again in whatever those people could be doing instead.

You can run that sum yourself before you ever contact us: who does the job now, and how much of their week does it take? Once you have a rough answer, the demo shows the same job running on its own, and you can weigh your sum against it.

Why the demo is free

You should judge a price like this on evidence. So before we meet, you tell us the one job costing you the most, and we build the demo around it. The first meeting opens with the demo running on your real work. Then we talk about what else is costing you and what we'd do about it. The home page sets out how that works step by step.

If the demo doesn't earn the conversation, you walk away owing nothing.

What the price covers

• Scoping the job properly: where the information arrives, who touches it, which tools it passes through and where it tends to stall.
• Building an agentic system, which is custom software that does the repetitive part of the job and hands the judgment calls to a person.
• Testing it on your real work, so you can see what it does before anybody relies on it.
• Handing it over working and wired into the tools you already run. The system is yours, with no seats or licences to pay for and no vendor lock-in.

The price also pays for the people doing the work, which is the two of us. Michael and Marcus scope, build, test and hand over every system personally. You deal with the founders from start to finish, which is also why we take on only a handful of clients a year.

Who it suits

A price like this only makes sense where the manual load is heavy enough to justify it. That's why we work with established, owner-led Australian businesses from around $3M in revenue and roughly 10 to 200 staff. The industry matters less than the manual load. We look for a good business held together by good people doing repetitive work that software should be doing.

Startups, and anyone after a cheap quick fix, will be better served elsewhere. The straight answers on the home page cover what happens at the first meeting and what happens to your data during the demo.

How the price conversation starts

The discovery brief asks about budget. The brief is a short questionnaire about your business and the budget range you have in mind. A range gives us something real to scope against, and it keeps the conversation plain from the start. If a job and a budget don't line up, it's better for both of us to find that out before any work begins.