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The offer

Five days. One working prototype. $950 USD.

A fixed-price week that ends with software running on your real data, and a written answer to whether the full project is worth doing.

Book the diagnostic first

What the week is

  • A 15-minute diagnostic before anything is booked, so we both know what we’re building.
  • Success criteria written down and agreed before day one. Specific and testable, not “improve efficiency”.
  • Five working days of my time, on one workflow, connected to your real systems.
  • A working prototype at the end — running, not demoed from a recording.
  • A written handover: what it does, what it costs to run, and what production hardening would take.

What happens if it doesn’t work

  • You get the fee back

    If the prototype misses the criteria we agreed in writing, you’re refunded. I decide nothing about that unilaterally — the criteria are the test.

  • You keep the deliverable

    Refunded or not, the code and the configuration are yours. There is no version of this week where you end up with nothing.

  • The fee credits forward

    If you continue to the full project, 100% of the sprint fee comes off the project price. The week costs you nothing in that case.

How you pay

Two ways to do this. Both put the risk on my side.

I’m not selling hours or deliverables. I’m selling a measurable outcome, and these are the two honest ways to price one.

Fixed price

$950 USD for the sprint, then a fixed project fee

You know the number before anything starts, and it does not move. The sprint fee is credited toward the project, so the week costs nothing if you continue.

How it runs

  1. A free 15-minute diagnostic. If automation is the wrong answer, that is where you find out.
  2. Success criteria written down and agreed before day one. Specific and testable.
  3. The five-day sprint. A working prototype on your real systems at the end of it.
  4. A fixed project fee to take it to production, quoted against what the sprint proved.

This fits when

  • You want the cost known and capped before anything begins.
  • The value is obvious to you but awkward to measure precisely.
  • Procurement needs a number on a purchase order.
  • The process spans systems where clean instrumentation would take longer than the build.

This does not fit when

  • You would rather I carried the outcome risk than the delivery risk.
  • The recovered value is large, clean and already measured — in that case the other model is better for you, not for me.
Book the diagnostic

Performance-based

Conditional

$950 USD for the sprint, then 20% of what it recovers for 12 months

No project fee. I take a share of the value the system actually produces, measured against a baseline we agree in writing before I build anything. If it recovers nothing, it costs nothing beyond the sprint.

How it runs

  1. The same free diagnostic, plus an honest look at whether your metric is clean enough to settle on.
  2. A baseline measured and agreed in writing, from your data, before any work starts.
  3. The five-day sprint, then the build — at my risk, with no project fee.
  4. A monthly statement from the same instrumentation you can read yourself. The share runs for a fixed term and then stops.

Offered only when all of these hold

  • One metric, already instrumented, that we both read the same way.
  • A baseline agreed in writing before any work starts.
  • Read access to the system that measures it, for the whole term.
  • A named person on your side who can settle a question about the number within a week.

This fits when

  • The metric is a single number both of us would read the same way — recovered calls, quotes sent inside the hour, tickets resolved without a person.
  • A baseline exists in your systems, or can be measured before work starts.
  • The value is large enough that a share of it is worth instrumenting for.
  • You would rather pay out of money that showed up than out of budget.

This does not fit when

  • The metric is contested, seasonal, or moved by things neither of us controls.
  • Attribution would be an argument every month. A deal that produces a monthly argument is worse than no deal.
  • You want the total cost capped and knowable in advance.
  • The work is worth doing but the value it creates is real and unmeasurable — most internal-efficiency work is exactly this.
See whether your metric qualifies

Both start with the same free diagnostic and the same five-day sprint under the same guarantee. The difference is only what happens after it, and you decide that once you have seen the prototype work.

Why isn’t this free?

Because free pilots don’t get anyone’s attention, including mine.

I’ve run them. The pattern is always the same: nobody senior is accountable for the outcome, the scope drifts because nothing is at stake, the access I need takes three weeks to arrive, and the week ends with a demo nobody has time to evaluate. The people most eager to take a free pilot are, reliably, the ones who were never going to buy.

The fee is what makes the week serious on both sides. You’ll assign someone who can answer questions the same day. I’ll turn down other work to protect the five days. And when the criteria are the thing my payment depends on, we both write them carefully.

It is priced to be a decision you can make without a committee — and it comes back to you either way, as a refund or as credit.

What is not included

Being clear about the edges of a fixed-price week is the whole reason it can be fixed-price.

  • Production hardening — retries, monitoring, alerting, failure recovery, load testing.
  • More than one workflow. The sprint is deliberately one.
  • Integrations beyond the ones named in the criteria.
  • Ongoing support, maintenance or an SLA.
  • Data migration or cleanup of existing records.
  • Training your team past the handover walkthrough.

All of it is available. None of it fits in five days, and pretending otherwise is how these engagements go wrong.

Whether this is for you

This is a fit if

  • You have a process that runs many times a week, the same way each time.
  • Someone can name what it costs you — in hours, in missed revenue, or in headcount.
  • You can give me access to the real systems, not a sandbox with fake data.
  • One person on your side can make decisions inside a week.
  • You’re between roughly 10 and 200 employees.

This is not a fit if

  • You want a chatbot on your website. That’s a different, cheaper thing, and I’m not the right person.
  • The process changes every time it runs and nobody can describe it.
  • Access to your systems needs a security review that takes longer than the sprint.
  • You’re looking for the lowest bid. There will always be one lower.
  • You want to see it work before you commit to anything at all — that’s what the free diagnostic is for, and it’s a fine place to start.

Book the free 15-minute diagnostic

15 minutes, no deck. You describe the process; I tell you whether it’s worth automating and roughly what it would take. If it isn’t, I’ll say so.

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Book a diagnostic