You've already spent on AI. The working system never arrived.
A strategy deck, a chatbot, a folder of automations someone set up and left behind. The invoices were real. The first job is an honest count of what's actually running, and I did that count on myself before offering it to anyone.
We've already spent on AI and still don't have working systems.From a real brief, August 2026
I audited my own stack first
Automations actually running
Of all the automations on my own platform, 4 of 215 had run at all in the previous month. 64 were zombies, stuck holding contacts mid-sequence. The rest were noise I was paying to host.
A year of software, cancelled
The consequence of that count: 6 SaaS tools cancelled and replaced with small systems I own outright. £12,000+ a year off the bill, receipt by receipt, in the ledger below. Most businesses I look at are quietly paying for a stack of tools nobody has opened in two years, half of them doing the same job. A cost audit is often the fastest ROI I deliver.
One chokepoint for every AI call
Every LLM call in my estate goes through one router. 22 roles, 14 of them pinned to local models, so private data never leaves the machine and those calls cost nothing to run. When something misbehaves there's exactly one place to look.
The machine that polices my own marketing
I built an honesty audit and pointed it at my own scripts before anyone else's: 9 audited, one binned outright because its claims didn't survive checking. I binned my own copy first, so you can expect the same straight read on your stack.
Sometimes the answer is build nothing
The audit comes first, and sometimes its answer is cancel the dead tools and build nothing. That's a result I'm happy to hand you. Anything you bolt onto a stack nobody has counted just turns into another line on the card statement.
First piece is fixed price, typically £750 to £1,500. Then we extend or stop. How pricing works →