The questions owners ask before they hire me

The first piece is fixed price, typically £750 to £1,500, quoted in writing before anything starts. After that, each piece is priced on its own. Ongoing help is month to month, and only once something is actually running. How pricing works.

It depends on the job, so here are two real ones. A coaching company's monthly event setup was running within about 21 hours of the first line of the build. My own email migration ran over one weekend. You get a date along with the fixed price.

I assume it will, because everything does. The AI only makes decisions, and ordinary code does the work and writes down what it did, so a failure arrives as a message to a person. On my own estate a watchdog reads 24 status lines every morning, and if the report itself doesn't arrive, that's the alarm. How I build for that.

No. Sending, charging, posting and deleting all sit behind a human yes in everything I ship. The machine drafts and queues, and a person presses the button. The receipts.

You do. The accounts are in your name, the data sits in your database and the code in your repo, with documentation your team can follow without ringing me. If we stop working together, you keep all of it. An engagement that ended, handed over.

Yes, and most of the owners I work with aren't. You describe the job in plain words, I ask the questions, and what you get back runs where you already work: a message on your phone, a page you open, a button you press. Viviana runs two businesses with no technical staff, and her van routes go out at 07:30 every morning without her touching them.

Into accounts you own. Where a job involves private data, I'd normally run it on models on a machine you control, so it never leaves. In my own operation 14 of 22 AI jobs work that way. Anything that genuinely needs a paid cloud model goes through one door, so you can see exactly what went where.

Then I'll tell you, and that's the whole answer. Sometimes the fix is a cheaper tool, sometimes it's nothing at all. I'd rather lose the build than sell you one you don't need.

Owner-run businesses across the UK, mostly remotely: a dog daycare with a van fleet, a coaching company, my own studio and online business. I don't know what the first piece would be in yours without having a look. The work, counted.