Buy a decision before you buy a build
Every engagement has a defined deliverable, a decision it supports and a price you can see before the first call. Start small when the problem is uncertain; go straight to delivery when it is not.
The engagement ladder
Each rung answers a different buyer question. Most relationships start on one of the first two and move up only when the previous result justifies it.
| Engagement | The decision you are buying | You receive | Indicative price | Typical duration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Readiness or feasibility review | Is this viable, and what is stopping it? | Baseline, findings, recommended scope, acceptance criteria, risks and open questions | £3,000–£6,000 | 1–2 weeks |
| Focused engineering sprint | Can you fix or deliver this particular boundary? | Working implementation, tests, measured result, operational handover | £15,000–£35,000 | 2–6 weeks |
| Production delivery project | Can you own this defined system outcome? | A deployed, accepted system within agreed constraints | Quoted after discovery | Agreed in the statement of work |
| Embedded senior AI engineering | Can you strengthen delivery for a defined period? | Committed capacity, owned outcomes, decision records, planned exit | Quoted per engagement | Agreed term with review checkpoints |
| Ongoing engineering support | Can you maintain the system and help us improve it? | Maintenance, evaluation runs, reserved change capacity, monthly summary | Monthly, quoted | Monthly, reviewed periodically |
Prices are indicative and exclude VAT where applicable. The fee for each engagement is fixed in writing once the scope is understood.
Readiness or feasibility review
A short, fixed-fee engagement that inspects the real workflow, code and constraints, then tells you whether to proceed, what to build first and how you will know it worked.
Scope, deliverables and fit →Focused engineering sprint
A fixed-scope implementation sprint against agreed acceptance criteria. You receive working code, tests, measured results and a handover your team can maintain.
Scope, deliverables and fit →Embedded senior AI engineering
Reserved, hands-on senior engineering capacity for a defined period — with explicit ownership, agreed priorities and a planned point to extend or hand over.
Scope, deliverables and fit →Ongoing engineering support
Defined support coverage for a system Neul Labs built or hardened: maintenance, dependency and model upgrades, evaluation runs and reserved capacity for change.
Scope, deliverables and fit →Owning a whole system outcome
Some outcomes are larger than a sprint: a new production AI workflow, a multi-system automation or a platform integration programme. Neul Labs takes these on as a single accountable scope, with one set of acceptance criteria and one party responsible for meeting them.
We do not quote these before understanding them. A delivery project follows a readiness review or equivalent analysis, and a check that the people and components needed are actually available for the period required. The customer is never asked to assemble suppliers or absorb the coordination between them.
How the work is quoted
- Well defined: a clear contract, benchmark or acceptance test can be quoted directly as a fixed-scope sprint.
- Partly defined: a fixed-fee review produces the acceptance criteria, then the build is quoted against them.
- Ambiguous: an "AI transformation" with no named workflow is not quoted. We help narrow it to something that can be.
Questions about buying
Why publish prices at all?
So you can judge fit before spending time on a call. The ranges are indicative; the fee for a specific engagement is fixed in writing once the scope is understood, and it does not change without a written agreement.
Do we always have to start with a paid review?
No. A well-defined piece of work — a connector with a clear contract, an optimisation with an agreed benchmark, a boundary with written acceptance tests — can be quoted directly as a sprint. Reviews are for situations that are not yet clear enough to price responsibly.
How are larger projects priced?
After discovery and a delivery-capacity check. A production delivery project is scoped from a readiness review or equivalent analysis, priced against its acceptance criteria and staffed only with capacity we can actually commit.
Who owns the work we pay for?
Ownership and licensing of deliverables are agreed in the statement of work, including what you may run, change and redistribute. Source, tests and documentation are handed over so your team can operate the result. Open-source components keep their own licences.
Not sure which engagement fits?
Describe the system and the decision in front of you. We will suggest the smallest engagement that would move it forward.
Scope a project