What an engagement costs.
An audit is a fixed fee from £10,000, the retainer runs from £5,000 a month, and anything built after that is priced by the roadmap your audit produces.
Most engagements start with the AI Audit and Transformation, a fixed fee from £10,000 agreed before anything starts. The audit runs within four weeks and ends in a costed 12 month roadmap. Many teams then keep us on as their Embedded AI Lead from £5,000 a month, reviewed month by month. Bespoke builds and private deployments are costed in the roadmap, each against a defined outcome, before you commit to anything. The work is done by the team that ran your audit, operating under ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 and holding Cyber Essentials.
How an engagement gets its price.
- First
AI Audit and Transformation
from £10,000
fixed fee · runs within four weeks
The fee covers the whole engagement, from the workshop week to the costed roadmap, and what sets it is how many workflows you want in range. It’s fixed once agreed: the number on the proposal is the number on the invoice.
- Then
Embedded AI Lead
from £5,000
monthly retainer
OpenKit becomes your business’s embedded AI team: the people who ran your audit stay on to deliver your 12 month roadmap. The retainer is scoped after the audit, against what it surfaced, and reviewed with you month by month as the work settles.
- Alongside
Bespoke Builds and private deployments
Costed in your roadmap
a fixed figure per build
Some roadmaps call for a bespoke build where nothing off the shelf will fit, and some need AI that runs inside your own controlled environment. We price each one in the roadmap, from what the audit found in your data and systems.
Governance sits beneath all three: what AI may and may not do, and who signs off, is written into an AI Charter rather than left to each build.
FAQ
Why are both prices “from” figures?
So you can rule us in or out before anyone books a call. The work changes shape with every client, so the exact fee is agreed in writing after a scoping conversation, and the figures here are where each engagement starts.
What moves the fee up?
For the audit, the count of workflows and systems in range, and the interviews it takes to map them properly. For the retainer, how much of each month is build work against the roadmap and how much is steering. Both quotes name what they cover, so scope can come out as well as go in.
When do we get an exact figure?
The audit is quoted after one scoping conversation. Anything it recommends is costed in the roadmap it produces, so by the time you’re choosing what to build, the figures are already on the table.
What does bespoke AI work cost at market rates?
Published UK market ranges put a single-workflow agent at roughly £10,000 to £30,000, and multi-agent work spanning several systems at £40,000 to £150,000 (OpenKit AI development cost guide). Regulated environments add ten to twenty percent for the security and audit work. OpenKit never quotes from a rate card: we scope each build against a defined outcome first.
Do the fees include VAT?
No. Every figure on this page excludes VAT, which is the standard footing between UK businesses, and it shows as a separate line on the quote.
Is there a cheaper way to start?
There is. The free AI readiness check scores where you stand in about five minutes, and the result gives a scoping conversation something concrete to start from.