PRICE LIST · REV 1 · FIXED PRICES — REASONS BELOW
You pay for removed risk, not for hours worked.
Every price below is fixed and public. Not because I cannot negotiate — because I know what happens to a machine when negotiation wins against construction. The story is at the bottom of this page.
01 · THE RAW MATERIAL MAP — £1,900
A full audit of three layers: technology · business · people. Output: the Raw Material Map — yours to keep, whatever road you take next. Delivery: within 2 weeks of the material landing on the table.
02 · THE FLIGHT TEST — £2,400
Design and execution of wind-tunnel trials: hypotheses, market tests, a verdict. Output: the Wind-Tunnel Report. Fair warning: sometimes the report says “we do not fly” — and then this money has just bought you the entire catastrophe never built.
03 · THE BLUEPRINT£6,500–9,500
The complete structural design: system and business architecture, a rollout map with decision gates. The heavy version (financial model, scenarios, investor materials) sits at the top of the range. With the Blueprint you may walk to any builder: zero lock-in.
04 · BUILD IN THE HANGARpriced from the Blueprint
I do not quote builds blind, and I will not let you buy one blind: the exact cost and schedule are the RESULT of stage 3, not a guess before it. The Blueprint contains the build quote with payment gates for accepted stages.
05 · ENGINE AND TICKET MACHINEwithin the build or separately
Designed in the Blueprint, switched on during the build. For existing machines (not built by me) — priced after a Raw Material Map.
STARTER PACKAGE 01+02+03 — £9,900
The first three stages in one path, with continuity of context and a single point of responsibility. You save up to £1,000 against the sum of the stages — and you save the most on the fact that nobody has to “hand anything over”.
06 · THE HANGAR£1,200–2,500 / month, billed quarterly
Ongoing care: monitoring, inspections, updates, development along the Blueprint's map. The range depends on the machine's complexity and pace of growth. Minimum one quarter — because reliability is a rhythm, not bursts. Notice: end of quarter, no penalties — the hangar also runs on “you stay because you want to”.
For ventures I believe in enough to vouch with a stake: part of the fee in cash, part in equity — always with vesting and always in writing. I take on a maximum of two such ventures a year — because co-ownership is a marriage, not a transaction. One of the current two seats is taken by MyMajster (story in the Hangar). Selection is sharp, and it cuts both ways.
Yes, more expensive. For reasons I know from the inside: procedures, tenders, committees, ten people on a call and decisions in quarterly rhythm — all of that is a real cost, so it lives in the price, not in my gritted teeth. I know the “hardware for a pound” game: pricing the hardware at £1 is the vendor's decision — our implementation is our quality and our price. The prestige of a logo on a reference list is not a currency and does not reduce the invoice.
A story instead of a lecture. Back in the SoundsBetter days, a Trio amplifier landed in my workshop — a classic which, after my tuning, played so well its owner sat at my place until three in the morning. Next to it stood a Yamaha — objectively better equipment on paper, but tuned “to a budget”, because its owner had negotiated. The difference was impossible not to hear. The same workshop, the same hands — a different agreement.
That day I understood something that thirty years in IT later confirmed: negotiating the price never changes the price. It changes the product. The negotiated 20% does not vanish from my margin — it vanishes from the number of tests, from the reserve for the unforeseen, from the hours in which the engineer thinks about your machine in the shower. I do not know how to take that 20% out of anywhere but quality — and quality is what we agreed on.
That is why the prices are fixed. We do not haggle over how reliable your machine will be.
Payment by stages, each time for an accepted result — not for a promise. You may disembark at any stage: the documents from completed stages are yours. I answer for the process and the structure; the pilot answers for the flight. The first conversation: £0 — with one promise: I will tell you honestly whether I will build a machine that flies.
Not every build is a system. Some are simply websites — to show what you do and catch the people looking for it. That work has its own address: superweb.uk, the workshop's web studio. Same hand, chamber scale — it builds websites that tell a story for people who need exactly that, and it is the studio that executes the web layer of the machines designed here. If a website is what you need, I will point you there plainly — the honest gate runs both ways.
The first conversation costs nothing and promises one thing: I will tell you honestly whether I will build a machine that flies.