Fixed prices, in pounds, on the website

Fixed prices. Agreed upfront. No surprises⁠.

The prices below cover a clearly defined piece of work and are agreed in writing before we begin.

All prices are in pounds sterling. Hardy & Butler Limited is not registered for VAT, so no VAT is added to any price on this page. If we register for VAT, VAT will be charged on top of the prices shown and this page will say so first.

If the scope changes, we agree a revised price before carrying out any additional work, never afterwards. There is no day rate because you are paying for a defined outcome, not an open-ended number of days.

Every engagement starts here

AI Opportunity Audit, £1,500.

Two weeks. Fixed. Credited in full against any build you start within sixty days.

You get:

The workflows worth automating, mapped and ranked by the hours and the pounds each would save. Two weeks covers the processes that matter, not every desk in the building.
A feasibility note on each one, in plain English, including the ones we would advise against.
A fixed price for the first build, so the next conversation is a decision and not another meeting.

If we cannot find £15,000 of recoverable annual value, we will tell you, you keep the report, and we will not pitch you.

Why not free? The audit is paid work. It maps the agreed processes, tests feasibility and gives you a written price for a first build. It takes two and a half senior days and produces the number the whole engagement turns on.

Three builds. Each one a fixed price.

First Agent

£6,500

Three to four weeks.

Founding clients: the first three First Agent builds signed by 31 January 2027 are £4,950, in return for a written case study we may publish. The audit stays £1,500 and is credited in full.

One agent, one workflow, live in production
Up to three system integrations
Human approval by default on anything leaving the business
Monitoring, error alerting and the Hardy oversight layer
Thirty days of tuning after go-live
Handover documentation and training for up to five people
You own what we build for you: the agent, the prompts, the configuration and the code. Third-party platforms and models stay under their own terms, and our existing tools are licensed to you

Recommended start

Agent Team

£18,500

Six to ten weeks.

Everything in First Agent
Three or four connected agents across one function, or a hand-off chain across two
Up to eight integrations
Shared error handling, retry logic and logging standards
Live monitoring and defined escalation rules
An evaluation set and monthly accuracy reporting
Sixty days of tuning, role-based training, documented procedures
A quarterly roadmap session for twelve months

Agent Operations

From £45,000

Scoped after the audit. The fixed price follows the scoping and is agreed in writing before the work.

Multi-function or multi-site rollout
Custom integration where no interface exists
Governance framework, audit trail, human oversight policy and DPIA support
Board-level reporting against the agreed business case
A named delivery lead and a change programme for the people affected
Six months of optimisation included

First Agent and Agent Team are fixed prices, not estimates. Agent Operations starts from £45,000 and becomes a fixed written price once it is scoped. The audit is what makes that possible.

Then there is running it, which in our experience is where most of these projects quietly fail.

An agent is not a website. It needs watching, tuning and occasionally stopping. Here is what that costs, published, so you can put it in a budget before you commit to the build.

Running plans compared: Agent Care, Agent Partner and Agent Ops
Feature	Agent Care£450 a month	Agent Partner£1,450 a month	Agent Ops£3,500 a month
Monitoring, alerting and break-fix	Yes	Yes	Yes
Monthly performance report	Yes	Yes	Yes
Changes included	Up to 2 hours	Up to 8 hours	Unlimited minor
New agent or major upgrade	Not included	One per quarter	Monthly build cycle
Prompt and evaluation tuning	Not included	Yes	Yes
Named contact	Not included	Yes	Named ops lead
Response SLA	Two working days	One working day	Four hours

And the costs that come to you, not to us.

You will also pay the underlying providers directly. Nobody marks these up and nobody hides them.

Automation platform, £20 to £80 a month
Model usage, £5 to £150 a month depending on volume
Telephony and messaging, at cost, only if your agent uses them

For a typical small business running one or two agents, that is £40 to £200 a month. We will estimate yours in the audit, and we would rather you saw the number now than in month three.

How we work, on every engagement

No logo wall. These are the terms instead.

Human approval by default on anything that leaves the business.
Client builds use only paid business tiers of AI services whose terms exclude training on client data.
UK data residency for the agent's own records, and a data processing agreement on every engagement. Model processing may happen outside the UK, under the provider's transfer safeguards. How this website handles an enquiry is set out in the privacy notice.
Working to UK GDPR.
A written oversight policy and an audit trail for every agent Hardy & Butler deploys.
You own what we build for you: the agent, the prompts, the configuration and the code. Third-party platforms and models stay under their own terms, and our existing tools are licensed to you. No lock-in.

Cyber Essentials and ISO 27001 are on our roadmap. We have not started either yet. The certificate numbers will be published here if and when they are issued, and not before.

If the audit does not find £15,000 of recoverable annual value, we will say so and we will not pitch you a build.

Losing a £6,500 build is better than selling you one that cannot pay for itself. Some audits will end this way, and it is better said in the audit report than discovered together after the build.

The £1,500 audit fee is not refunded. You keep the report and the ranked list, which are what the fee buys, and we do not pitch you a build we cannot stand behind.

Illustrative, worked from these assumptions, not a forecast. The agent recovers £15,000 a year, the audit threshold above, which is £1,250 a month. Month 0 is go-live, with £6,500 paid: the £1,500 audit plus the £6,500 First Agent build, less the £1,500 audit credit. From go-live you pay £450 a month for Agent Care and about £120 a month to the providers, the middle of the £40 to £200 range above. That leaves £680 a month. £6,500 divided by £680 is about 9.6, so the £6,500 is paid back between month 9 and month 10. Your audit produces the real curve.

Three things we will not do on price.

No day rates. You would be comparing us to a contractor, and you are not buying days, you are buying a working thing with a number against it.
No pure outcome pricing. It sounds attractive and it ends in an argument about attribution. If you want skin in the game, we will put a performance element on top of a fixed fee, tied to something we can both measure in the first ninety days.
No "enterprise, talk to sales". The top tier has a number on it like the other two.

What the research actually says, including the parts that do not help us.

5.2 hours

a week. What UK SMEs using AI say they save: more than half a day.

OpenAI research on UK SMEs, reported by Enterprise Nation.

75%

of UK AI adopters report improved productivity. Only 12% report higher revenue.

DSIT AI Adoption Research, 3,500 UK businesses, published January 2026.

Over 40%

of agentic AI projects are forecast to be cancelled by the end of 2027.

Gartner, June 2025.

So we price against hours and cost, never against revenue, and we publish the cancellation forecast on our own pricing page, because cost, value and risk need to be discussed before a build starts. Every figure on this site has a named source and a date. If we cannot source it, we do not print it.

Questions people ask before they buy.

How much does an AI agent cost for a small business?

A first agent is a fixed £6,500, live in production in three to four weeks, after a £1,500 two-week audit that is credited in full against any build you start within sixty days. Running it costs from £450 a month, plus £40 to £200 a month paid directly to the automation and model providers. We are not VAT registered, so no VAT is added.

Why is the audit not free?

The audit is paid work. It maps the agreed processes, tests feasibility and gives you a written price for a first build. It takes two and a half senior days, produces the number the whole engagement turns on, and is credited in full against any build you start within sixty days.

What happens if the audit finds nothing worth building?

If we cannot find £15,000 of recoverable annual value, we tell you, you keep the report, and we will not pitch you. The £1,500 audit fee is not refunded. The report and the ranked list are what it buys.

Is there a day rate?

No. You are paying for a defined outcome, not an open-ended number of days. If the scope changes, we agree a revised price before carrying out any additional work, never afterwards.

What do I pay the model and automation providers?

You pay them directly and nobody marks it up: an automation platform at £20 to £80 a month, model usage at £5 to £150 a month depending on volume, and telephony or messaging at cost, only if your agent uses them. For a typical small business running one or two agents that is £40 to £200 a month.

What does it cost to run an agent each month?

Agent Care is £450 a month, Agent Partner £1,450 and Agent Ops £3,500. All three include monitoring, alerting, break-fix and a monthly performance report. The difference is the hours of changes included, prompt and evaluation tuning, a named contact, and the response time, which runs from two working days to four hours.

Who owns the agent?

You do. On every build, you own what we build for you: the agent, the prompts, the configuration and the code. Third-party platforms and models stay under their own terms, and our existing tools are licensed to you.

When do I pay?

The audit is paid when you book it. A build is paid half on order and half at go-live.

How long does a running plan last?

Three months minimum, then month to month with 30 days' notice. You still own what we build.

Do you charge for travel?

No. There are no travel charges anywhere in the UK; travel is in the fixed price.

What training does my team get?

A two-hour session on your own workflow in go-live week, so your team can use it straight away. Up to five people on a First Agent, up to fifteen on an Agent Team.

These answers describe how we work. Nothing on this website is an offer capable of acceptance. A contract with us exists only when both of us have signed an engagement agreement, as our terms explain.

Tell us about those tasks that never land on time.

You do not need to know what an agent is, how it works, or which one you need. Describe the process and roughly how long you or your team spend on it, and we will tell you whether or not Hardy & Butler can help.

Book a free 30-minute call Start with the audit

£1,500, credited in full against your first agent.