One rate. £1,000 a day.
Four things to buy, at one rate, whatever size you are, because everyone gets the same thing. Every price is fixed before work starts, and any fixed price can be paid in three monthly instalments at no extra cost.
Second Lens is not VAT registered, so the number quoted is the number invoiced. For charities, healthcare providers and anyone else who cannot reclaim VAT, that makes the same work roughly twenty percent cheaper than a registered competitor. UK independent AI consultants commonly charge between £500 and £1,500 a day; £1,000 sits mid-market, with nothing on top.
The price list
One rate, £1,000 a day, with no VAT to add. The review comes first and everything after it is quoted as a fixed number of days before it starts.
The review
A proper report. Every AI tool already in your business including the unapproved ones, where your data actually sits, what is worth doing, what is not, and the data protection position on each.
The work
Starts at two days: one input, one output, nothing touching a live system. Beyond that it is £1,000 a day, quoted as a fixed number of days before it starts. Never open-ended, never revised upward without a new quote.
On call
One hour a month plus email throughout. Board papers read, vendor quotes checked, contracts looked at before they are signed. If something needs more than that, we agree extra days first.
Keeping it running
For a system built here: quarterly dependency and security updates, break-fix by email with a response within two working days, cover for vendor changes that break the integration, and a short written note each quarter on what changed.
What a day buys
One rate keeps the price list short. These are typical pieces of work and what they usually take. Examples, not separate products.
Anything larger than about ten days goes to a contract developer, by design rather than by limitation. The value here is deciding what to build and proving that it works. Introducing the right developer, and taking no referral fee for it, is a better outcome than a project that runs late.
Eight days, day by day
A worked example, with an invented firm and real arithmetic. A 35-person business receives around sixty supplier documents a month by email: insurance certificates, accreditations, method statements. Someone opens each one and types eight fields into a system. It takes about a day a week, and it slips when they are busy.
Read, then question
The intake pack, sample documents and vendor contracts, then the data protection position: lawful basis, what leaves your estate, whether an impact assessment is needed.
Build
Mailbox intake, extraction, a human review screen, and write-back into the system they already use.
Prove it
Accuracy tested against 100 historical documents with known answers. Scored, not asserted.
Hand it over
A written runbook and a recorded walkthrough: what to do when it is wrong, and how to spot it drifting.
Eight days, £8,000. A day a week of one person's time is roughly £9,000 a year, so payback lands around twelve months, before counting the errors that arrive with rushed typing. Below about forty documents a month a build like this does not pay back, and the honest answer is to say so before quoting rather than after building.
All of it, in writing.
How it starts
A short written intake. You describe what is slow and what you have been meaning to fix, and get awkward questions back, mostly about your data and who owns it.
How it continues
Findings, recommendations, code, runbooks and recorded walkthroughs, by email and shared documents. Questions answered in writing within two working days. No standing meetings, no status calls.
Written analysis can be checked, forwarded, disagreed with in the margin, and read again in eighteen months when somebody asks why a decision was made. A workshop cannot. Nothing in your business stops, nobody sits in a room, and there is no travel on the invoice.
Not offered, on purpose
Site visits
Nothing here needs a visit to be seen.
Screenshots, screen recordings and sample data by email.
Workshops and training days
A room forgets. A recording does not.
A written runbook and a recorded walkthrough, replayable for the people who were not there.
Standing weekly calls
Status calls burn hours and settle nothing.
Written updates, and questions answered within two working days.
Live demos
A live demo shows the happy path, once.
A recorded demonstration, sent in advance, watchable twice.
Reselling software
A recommendation with a margin on it is an advert.
Licences bought directly by you, in your own name. No margin taken.
Anything over ten days
Long builds belong with a contract developer.
An introduction to the right one, with no referral fee.
How the money works
Everything starts with the review, at £1,250, and it is credited in full against any work commissioned within ninety days. If you proceed, the review was free. If you do not, you still have the report.
Builds are paid in thirds: a third up front, a third at the halfway point, and a third on handover, when the work and its intellectual property transfer to you. Any fixed price can instead be paid in three monthly instalments at no extra cost. Same money, smaller decision.
Three things are never inside a quoted price and are always billed at cost with no margin: software licences, which you buy directly in your own name, cloud and hosting, and model usage, estimated in the quote and reconciled monthly.
There is no travel, no expenses line and no disbursements. What you are quoted is what you pay, and there is no VAT on top.
Who this suits, and who it does not
Written delivery works when a process can be seen from outside. It works badly when it cannot, and saying so before anything is commissioned is better than discovering it in week two of a build.
A good fit
- The process lives in a systemMost finance, compliance, onboarding, claims and document handling work qualifies.
- It has documents attachedCertificates, invoices, applications, forms: things that arrive and need reading.
- Someone can record their screen doing itIf it can be watched, it can be understood and improved.
A poor fit
- It lives entirely in people's headsAnd changes depending on who is doing it that day.
- Nobody has ever written it downA scheduling process that sits with two people and a whiteboard is a poor fit.
- It needs a person in the roomSite visits are not offered, and selling around that would waste your money.