When a business first decides to take AI seriously, the hardest question is not which model or which tool. It is what to actually buy. Spend too early and you build the wrong thing beautifully. Spend too late and you spend months in meetings while the problem keeps costing you. The way to avoid both is to match the engagement to where you genuinely are, which is the entire reason we keep the menu short and the scope fixed.
There are three productized ways to start and one way to stay. An Audit tells you what to build. A Sprint builds it. A Custom engagement handles the builds too big for a single Sprint. And a Retainer keeps whatever you own running and improving. Here is how to tell which of those you need right now.
| Tier | Price | Best when |
|---|---|---|
| AI Audit | €1,999 | You suspect you are losing time but cannot name the fix |
| Sprint | €4,999 | You know the workflow you want built and want it shipped |
| Custom | from €10K | The build spans several systems or bespoke logic |
| Retainer | from €2,500 / mo | You have systems live and want them kept healthy |
Start with the Audit when you cannot name the bottleneck
Plenty of owners feel the symptom clearly without being able to point at the cause. The week disappears into admin, the team is busy without obviously moving the business forward, and you know in your bones that some of it should be automated. You just do not know which part would pay off first. That uncertainty is what the Audit is for.
Over three business days we review your operations and your stack through an AI lens, then hand you a prioritized list of what to automate and how, including the tools and models that fit and a plan you can execute yourself or pass to any team. There is no obligation to build with us afterward, which is the point. If the honest answer is that a spreadsheet and a well-configured workflow would solve it, that is what the Audit will say. If you want the longer version of how to do this yourself first, our guide on how to run an AI audit on your own operations walks through the same method.
Go straight to a Sprint when you already know the job
If you can describe the workflow you want in a sentence or two, the talking phase is just delay dressed up as diligence. The Sprint is a five-day, fixed-scope build for €4,999, with the scope agreed before anyone starts so there is no creep and no open-ended timeline. At the end you get the thing built, tested, and handed over with documentation, and you own it outright.
Lead routing, document processing, an internal search tool over your own knowledge, an intent-driven support triage: these are the shapes that fit a Sprint well. They are discrete, they have a clear definition of done, and they ship to production rather than to a slide. A Sprint is also eligible for the retainer afterward, which matters more than it sounds, for reasons we will get to.
Reach for Custom only when the work demands it
Some problems are genuinely bigger than a Sprint. Several systems that have to talk to each other, bespoke logic that does not fit a template, multimodal inputs, real complexity. That is the Custom tier, from €10K, scoped and quoted per engagement and built by a senior team without offshoring.
The minimum is not a velvet rope. Below roughly €10K, a multi-system build gets compressed in ways that quietly damage the outcome, so we would rather tell you up front that a productized tier fits better than take the money and deliver something cramped. Most needs, in practice, are an Audit or a Sprint. Custom is the exception, not the default.
The Retainer is the part most people underestimate
Whichever way you start, you end up owning a system, and systems do not stay still. Models get deprecated, APIs change, prompts drift, and the business you built the automation for in spring is not quite the business you are running by autumn. Unmaintained automations degrade quietly until they break, usually at the worst time.
The AI Operations Retainer is the answer to that. From €2,500 a month it covers monitoring and maintenance of everything we have delivered, updates when providers change their models or APIs, one new build a month, and a quarterly roadmap session. The Scale tier at €4,500 a month adds a second monthly build and deeper strategy. It is month to month with thirty days notice, because we would rather earn the renewal than lock you in. If you want the full shape of it, the retainer page lays out exactly what is and is not covered.
A simple way to decide
If you cannot yet name the single highest-value thing to automate, start with the Audit. If you can, and your data is in reasonable order, book a Sprint. If the job is plainly too large for one week, talk to us about Custom. And once anything is live and you depend on it, the retainer is what stops it rotting. For the money side of all this, our breakdown of what AI automation actually costs a small business puts real numbers against each path.