Every Newcastle business owner we speak to has the same first question. What does this cost.
The honest answer is that it depends on four things you can name in advance. Here is how we price production AI software in 2026, the two ways you can work with us, and what drives the number on your specific engagement.
How pricing works: one project, or an ongoing team
You can work with us in two ways. Both start with a written scope and price.
AI Automation is one complete project. We scope it, price it up front, build it, deploy it and hand it over. Every project includes a defined support period after go-live.
AI Solutions is an ongoing partnership. You get a CTO and a dedicated engineering team who work as an extension of yours: monthly delivery sprints, a biweekly CTO strategy review, reserved capacity for requests from your staff, and support of what is live.
Many clients start with a project and move onto AI Solutions once the first system is live. Production AI is rarely a one-off. The first workflow proves the value. The second, third, and fourth compound on top of it. Models move forward, integrations drift as your upstream systems change, compliance regimes tighten, and new automation opportunities keep surfacing as the team sees what the first ones did. An ongoing team keeps that moving without renegotiating scope every quarter.
The two AI Solutions tracks
If you want an ongoing team, AI Solutions has two tracks.
Existing systems
For businesses that already have AI or automation running and need it properly owned. Stewardship of what is live, remediation of no-code or prototype workflows that have become load-bearing, and a steady cadence of new workflows on top of the existing base.
This is typically the right starting point if you have something in production already and it is costing more in workarounds than it saves.
New systems
For businesses starting from zero. Full greenfield: discovery, architecture, first workflow in production inside six weeks, ongoing build from there. Everything is engineered for your infrastructure from the outset rather than retrofitted onto someone else's platform.
This is the right starting point if you are committing to production AI for the first time and want it built properly. If you only need one system built and handed over, an AI Automation project is the simpler place to start.
Scope-dependent pricing
Pricing scales with scope, for a single project and for an ongoing team. A single-site operator automating three or four workflows sits at the lower end. A multi-site group with regulated data, deep integrations across a legacy ERP, and parallel workstreams across finance, ops, and compliance sits well above it. You get a written scope and price within a week of the discovery call, so finance knows the number before anything starts.
What drives the cost
Whether you buy one project or an ongoing team, your budget buys engineering time, not licence seats. What that time is spent on depends on four variables.
Integration complexity. Reading from and writing to your ERP, CRM, finance system, or bespoke platform is the most time-variable part of any build. Modern REST APIs are fast. Legacy systems requiring RPA, screen-scraping, or bespoke adapters take longer. A finance automation into Xero is cheap to integrate. The same automation into a bespoke 1990s accounts package is not.
Data quality. Clean structured data is cheap to work with. Noisy unstructured data (handwritten forms, inconsistent PDFs, voice transcripts, free-text shift reports) needs more pipeline engineering to become reliable. The AI part is rarely the bottleneck; the pre-processing and validation around it usually is.
Compliance requirements. Regulated sectors (finance, legal, healthcare, defence, education holding sensitive personal data) need audit trails, private AI on-premise, tighter data handling, and evidence on demand for a supervisor visit. That adds engineering time, and it is not optional. It is also why we are ISO 27001:2022 certified and Cyber Essentials accredited: regulated clients can only buy from vendors who have done this groundwork properly.
Scope and cadence. A project covering one workflow costs less than one spanning three departments. An ongoing team with one concurrent workstream moves more slowly and costs less than one with three running in parallel. Clients dial this up and down as their roadmap demands.
Why Newcastle
This is not a cost arbitrage. Newcastle has an unusually deep engineering talent pool: Northumbria, Newcastle University, Durham, plus Sage and the Nissan tier-one supply chain have trained generations of enterprise software engineers in the region. The density of serious engineering here is the reason we build from Newcastle, not a discount positioning.
The output is software that can hold up in production for years, with the governance and documentation to match. Clients pay a premium rate for premium engineering. They get a system built for their business, by a team that will still be here in five years.
What it does not include
No per-seat software licences on work we build. No cloud LLM subscription that you pay us every month. We build custom software for you, running on infrastructure you control, with model choices you can swap without renegotiating.
Hosting and model API costs sit outside our fee and are paid directly by you to your cloud and model providers, with no mark-up. These typically run £100 to £500 per month at SMB volumes, billed transparently to your own accounts.
The structural reason privately-deployed AI is cheaper over a multi-year horizon than SaaS equivalents is laid out in on-device AI architecture cost vs cloud LLMs.
What the return looks like
Our engagements typically pay back inside the first year in administrative time recovered and new revenue unlocked. The range of outcomes we ship across clients is wide: a poker operator recovered 18% of revenue through real-time fraud detection, an accounting firm reduced a 12-person admin team to 2 senior reviewers with 10 redeployed to sales, a consultancy compressed a 700-hour process to 30 minutes, and a higher education client went from 22 days to 4 hours on DPO and SAR work.
Your specific return depends on which processes you automate first and how much manual admin sits behind them today. See the cost of not automating for the calculation method.
Getting started
Exact pricing is set against a written scope. After a 30-minute discovery call we send you a written scope and price within a week, so finance knows the number before anything starts. No multi-round procurement cycles, no hidden change fees, no per-seat surprises.
