Services
Clear pricing. Real builds. No mystery.
Most agencies hide the ball — vague scopes, hourly billing, surprise invoices. We don't. There are three ways to work with us, they run in order, and you'll always know what you're getting and what it costs.
Three stages, in order.
Most clients do all three. You don't have to.
Each stage stands on its own. Plenty of businesses take the Discovery, act on it themselves, and we part on good terms. That's a perfectly good outcome — you'll still know more about your own operation than you did a fortnight earlier.
Discovery
£1,000–£2,500 · fixed price · 1–2 weeks · comes off your build
Before anyone builds anything, we work out what's actually worth building. Discovery is a short, paid audit of how your business really runs — not how the process document says it runs.
Business analysis and strategy, in plain English. You'll come out of it understanding your own operation better than you did going in — whether or not you build anything with us.
What happens
- We talk to the people doing the work.
- Not just the person who owns the problem. The estimator, the supervisor, the admin who holds it all together, whoever's actually filling in the sheets. They know where it's broken.
- We follow the work end to end.
- From the enquiry to the invoice, including every point where something gets re-typed, printed, photographed, or chased.
- We look at what you already pay for.
- Most businesses are carrying two or three tools they've half-adopted. Sometimes the answer is to use one of them properly, and we'll tell you if it is.
- We find what's held in someone's head.
- Every business has a person who knows how it all works. That's a risk, and it's usually fixable.
What you get
- A plain-English map of where the time, money and risk are leaking
- A prioritised roadmap — what to fix, in what order, and what can wait
- A fixed quote for the build, with no surprises later
- A working shell of the system, with your own data in it
- The full fee credited against your first build
You shouldn't have to buy software from a document.
So we build you a piece of it. By the end of Discovery you'll have clicked around a working version of what we're proposing — your sites, your jobs, your data — on your own screen.
It's not the finished system. It's enough to recognise your own business in it, and enough to argue with. Most of the best decisions on a build come from someone looking at a real screen and saying “that's not how we do it.”
What it costs you in time:about half a day of your time, an hour or two each with three or four of your people, and access to a few real examples — a job that went well, a job that went badly, and last month's paperwork. That's it.
Build
Fixed scope · fixed price · quoted from Discovery
This is where the thing gets made. We work in fixed scopes and fixed prices, so you know the cost before we start and there's no hourly meter running in the background.
Sprint
A single workflow, automation, or tool. Around 1–2 weeks.
System
A multi-part internal system with integrations. Around 4–8 weeks.
Platform
A full custom application, built to run a core part of your business.
We change how the work is done, not just what it's done in
Putting a broken process into a nice interface gets you a nicer broken process.
So a build includes the awkward conversations — why a thing is done that way, whether the form actually needs six fields, which step exists because of a problem that got fixed in 2019. Some of what changes is the software. Some of it is how the work gets done, and who does it.
That means new ways of working, which means people have to come with us. So we don't hand it over at the end and wish you luck. We run a session every week as it goes in — your team sees it, uses it, tells us what's wrong, and we fix it before the next one. By go-live they've been using it for weeks and nobody's being trained on a system they've never seen.
On bigger builds we roll it out department by department rather than all at once. Slower on paper. Much faster in practice, because nothing gets rejected at the last minute.
What's included
- Development, obviously
- The process and SOP work that goes with it
- Training your team as it goes in — a weekly review and working session, not a handover at the end
- Snagging after go-live
- A fixed price you agreed before we started
What's not
- Hosting and ongoing support — that's Partner, from £500/month
- Third-party licences and subscriptions, if the build needs any
- Hardware
- Anything that turns up mid-build and wasn't in the scope. We'll price it separately and you can decide — we won't quietly absorb it and we won't quietly bill you for it
Partner
From £500/month · rolling · 3-month minimum
Software's never finished. The businesses that get the most out of what we build are the ones we keep working with — improving it, extending it, and fixing things before they turn into problems.
What it covers
- Hosting, backups, monitoring, and support for what we've built
- A monthly block of development time to keep improving it
- A regular session to look at what's working and what isn't
- A build partner on call when something new comes up
What that block of time gets used for is up to you. Some months it's a new report someone needs. Some months it's a change because a client or a regulator moved the goalposts. Some months it's nothing and we leave you alone.
Where AI comes in
This is usually where AI starts earning its keep. Once the foundations are in and the work is being captured properly, there's something for it to work with — and by then you'll know exactly where it's worth pointing.
Automating the parts of a workflow that don't need a person. Pulling information out of documents nobody has time to read. Drafting the things that get written the same way every time. Useful, specific, and worth doing — once the records underneath them are in order.
It's not a condition of working with us. Plenty of clients get the foundations right and stop there, quite happily.
What you own at the end of it.
- The software.
- You own what we build. It's yours, not licensed back to you.
- The data.
- Yours, exportable, whenever you want it. No hostage-taking.
- The ability to leave.
- We build on standard, well-known technology. If you ever want to take it elsewhere, another developer can pick it up without an archaeology dig — and we'll help with the handover rather than making it difficult.
- No lock-in on the retainer.
- Partner is rolling with three months' notice. If we're not earning it, you should stop paying it.
We'd rather keep clients because they want us than because leaving is a nightmare. The Mikerry Rail platform is twelve years old. Nobody's ever been trapped into it.
Why this works
We're not the cheapest, and we're not trying to be. We're the option that's genuinely affordable for a small business and actually ships working software — because the AI tooling we use every day means we deliver more, faster, than a studio our size has any right to.
That saving gets passed to you in the price. The quality doesn't move.
It's also why the prices are on this page at all. If we were charging by the hour we'd have every reason to keep them vague.
What we don't do.
- Hourly billing.
- Fixed scopes, fixed prices. If we estimate badly, that's our problem, not your invoice.
- Work we don't think will pay for itself.
- If the maths doesn't work, we'll say so in the first conversation. It happens more often than you'd think.
- Rip-and-replace.
- If Sage is your system of record, it stays your system of record and we integrate with it. Replacing something that works is an expensive way to feel busy.
- Disappearing at go-live.
- The handover isn't the finish line. It's roughly the halfway point.
- The cheapest quote.
- There'll usually be one. It's rarely the one that ends up costing least.
What we'll need from you: time with the people who actually do the work, honesty about the workarounds, and someone who can make a decision without convening a committee. More on how we work →
What else you could do.
- Buy off-the-shelf.
- Fastest and cheapest up front, and sometimes it's genuinely the right answer — we'll tell you when it is. The catch is fit: you adapt to the software, and the gaps get filled with spreadsheets. That's fine until the gaps are the bit that proves you did the job.
- Hire a developer.
- Full control, and it makes sense once there's enough work to keep someone busy for years. Below that you're carrying a salary, recruiting for a skillset you can't assess, and betting the business on one person's notice period.
- Go to a big agency.
- More people, more process, and a rate card to match. Works well for big programmes. For a fifty-person business it usually means a senior name at the pitch and a junior on the actual work.
- Work with us.
- Small team, fixed prices, and the person who understands your business stays with it — from the first conversation to the thing still running three years later. We're not right for everyone. If you need a hundred developers, we're not it.
Also from the studio.
One other thing we do. It's not what this page is about, but it comes up.
Websites & hosting
Sometimes you don't need a system. You need a website that works — fast, findable, and built to do a job rather than sit there looking pretty. We design and build them for businesses across South Wales and beyond, then host and look after them. Twenty years of it. It's also how a lot of clients first work with us.
Talk to us about a websiteThe commercial questions.
Not sure which one you need?
That's what the first conversation is for. It's free, it takes half an hour, and you'll leave knowing whether the thing is worth doing at all — including if the answer is that it isn't.