Four numbers.
That’s the model.

How it works

Four steps. Same every time.

Run — the monthly

We keep your product running.
Not your laptops.

Run is your product’s operations — monitoring, backups, patching, certificates, access control — not your company’s IT. Two tiers, and the only question that decides which is whether anyone is paying to use it yet.

Every build we do includes making the product observable from the start. It is not an upsell — it is what lets the monthly price be what it is. Instrumenting the product, wiring the alerts, writing the runbooks and testing the restore is one-off work. It is folded into the build, not buried in your first month.

What the market charges

And how thin the evidence is

No UK devops consultancy publishes a rate card. The Scale Factory merged and its pricing page returns a 404; Fivenines, Just After Midnight and Transputec publish nothing. So every retainer figure above is one consultancy’s estimate of what the others charge, and only the ITJobsWatch day rate is hard. We would rather show you a thin evidence base than a confident-looking one we made up — and it cuts both ways, because it also means nobody else in this market publishes what they charge.

What Run is not

The Studio runs your product. Smart Path IT runs your office.

Laptops, Microsoft 365, identity, joiners and leavers, endpoint security and Cyber Essentials for the company are a genuinely different product, delivered by the people who do that for a living. If you need it we will point you across, on their pricing rather than a marked-up version of it. It works the other way too.

The term

How long you commit for

Run on its own is a 12-month minimum, then rolling with 30 days’ notice.

If we’ve discounted your build, the term matches the discount — 24 months for 20% off, or 36 months if you’d also like your Run price fixed for the whole period. That’s the trade, and it’s the only reason the discount exists.

If you leave early, you repay the discount you haven’t earned

Not the remaining months. You repay the part of the build discount you have not yet earned, pro rata, by month — and nothing else. On a £40,000 build discounted by 20%, leaving at the halfway point costs you about £4,000.

Build

£30,000–£48,000 for a UK-built MVP over 8–12 weeks

Against a defensible market reference of £35,000–£55,000. Roughly 10–15% under, and explicitly UK-built. We don’t go below £30,000 — under that we would stop competing with UK agencies and start competing with offshore teams on their cost base, and the honest comparison there is not the one the advert makes.

Commit for longer, pay less

One simple trade. You pick.

Nothing is hidden and nothing appears late. It is the shape of a phone contract, which is why founders understand it instantly.

The stake is rare and deliberate — two a year, each agreed individually rather than sold off a page. That is also why it is the one line here without a percentage against it.

Fractional CTO

Priced at every commitment level, not “from”

If you want to part-pay a fractional role in equity, the credible band is 0.25–0.75%, and 1% is a hard ceiling for part-time work. We price it off the cash gap, not off a gut percentage — the same method as everything else.

Day rates

For time-and-materials work

Ten days a month or more and those drop by 10%. A fixed-scope build is priced differently, and higher, because the overrun risk is ours — the estimator shows that working.

Cyber Essentials

Passed through at cost, never marked up

IASME does not publish a fixed Cyber Essentials Plus fee — it is quoted individually on network size and complexity. Anyone quoting you a fixed IASME CE Plus fee is quoting a certification body’s price, not IASME’s.

The equity option

In one paragraph

We cut the build price and take a small stake instead — usually between 1% and 8%. Non-voting, no board seat, capped at 10%. It vests as we deliver, and you can buy us out at a pre-agreed price whenever you want. We do two a year, so we will tell you honestly if you are not one of them.