Pricing and commercials, answered in full.

On the UK government's G-Cloud 14 framework, which G-Cloud 15 succeeded on 6 August 2026 but has not yet replaced because G-Cloud 15 publishes no pricing documents, the highest published onshore day rates at SFIA Level 7 among the Big Four are KPMG £2,855, PwC £2,750 on its Strategy and architecture column, Deloitte £2,740 on its specialist card and £2,450 on its standard card, and EY £2,600. For context, two large non-Big-Four suppliers publish rates that bracket them, PA Consulting at £3,625 and Accenture at £2,240, with TCS at £2,050. Mid-grade rates are far lower. Accenture Level 4 is £1,040, TCS £1,070, EY £1,300. These are competitively tendered public-sector framework rates and may differ from private-sector commercial rates. Every figure is quoted from the supplier's own card, linked on our pricing page, and every card was re-verified against its source on 21 August 2026.

At the top grade yes, and by much less than people assume. Our partner rate of £1,560 is 55–60% of the Big Four Level 7 rates we could locate, a multiple of 1.7 to 1.8, not the four times often claimed. Across every large firm on the framework the range is 1.3 to 2.3. It reverses at mid grades, where EY publishes a Level 4 rate above our senior rate and, outside the Big Four, both Accenture and TCS publish Level 4 rates inside our associate-to-senior band. Where the cost difference appears is team size and duration rather than day rate, and that depends entirely on scope.

Tenhaw publishes both. Day rates: partner £1,560, senior practitioner £1,250, associate £950, excluding VAT. Engagements: AI Readiness Audit £44,000 fixed; Agentic Proof of Concept £20,000–£55,000 fixed over 2–4 weeks; Agentic Design Team £35,000–£55,000 per month; Agentic Build Team £70,000–£85,000 per month; Programme and Delivery Management £18,000–£35,000 per month. Every engagement price derives from the rate card at twenty billable days a month.

Per day, clearly yes. Our estimate is that a senior contract delivery manager, AI engineer or solutions architect is advertised around £530 to £630 a day, and that agency margin takes what you pay to roughly £610 to £870. That is our read of the market rather than a published figure, so check it against your own recruitment data. What it buys is an individual, not a team with an operating model, adoption function and someone accountable for the outcome. For a defined scope where the operating model is not in question, a contractor is the better buy and we will say so.

Five lines, all billed to your own accounts inside your own tenancy on your own vendor contracts: model inference, the platform, storage and search, evaluation and monitoring, and human review time. Tenhaw does not resell or mark up models, platforms or licences, so no part of your run cost is revenue for us, and every engagement price we publish is build cost only. The figure itself moves with volumes, with the model you choose and with how much of the work still needs a human eye, which is why the AI Readiness Audit produces an estimated run cost per candidate workflow as a named deliverable, derived from prototypes run against your own data.

So the comparison can be checked rather than taken on trust. The common assumption is that large firms charge roughly four times boutique rates; the published evidence says 1.3 to 2.3 times at the top grade across the framework, 1.7 to 1.8 times for the Big Four specifically, and at some grades they are cheaper than us. Every competitor figure in the rate table links to the supplier's own PDF, so you can put your comparator's numbers beside ours.

We believe so, and no public dataset compares time-to-outcome across supplier types, so we will not assert it as fact. What we commit to is our own cadence: monthly value delivered that we report against, a proof of concept in two to four weeks, and a fixed price agreed before the work starts. Judge that against whatever your incumbent supplier is committing to in writing.

Every engagement price derives from the published rate card at twenty billable days a month, so you can rebuild any band yourself. Take the Agentic Design Team. Two senior practitioners full time at £1,250 a day for twenty days is £50,000 a month, and the published £35,000–£55,000 band spans part time through to full time plus partner input. The audit is built the same way, partner five days, senior operator twenty, build engineer nine, sold as one fixed £44,000 over four weeks. Fixed-price engagements do carry a modest premium over the day-rate equivalent, because the scope risk transfers to us rather than sitting with you.

Three things: how long the day is, which category column you are quoting, and what the grade label means. EY's G-Cloud card defines a working day as 7 hours where the others use 8, roughly a 14% gap the headline rate hides. PwC's card varies sharply by category, £2,750 at Level 7 under Strategy and architecture but £1,000 under Delivery and operation, so the column you pick changes the answer. And SFIA levels are not job titles. No card says partner, director or manager, so mapping levels onto grades is guesswork. Worth knowing too, framework rates are competitively tendered, which puts private commercial rates above them more often than below.

Two shapes, both priced from the published bands. A cautious start, an Agentic Proof of Concept at £20,000–£55,000 fixed then eleven months of Programme and Delivery Management at £18,000–£35,000 a month, comes to £218,000–£440,000. A full start, the £44,000 AI Readiness Audit then eleven months of an Agentic Build Team at £70,000–£85,000 a month, comes to £814,000–£979,000. Almost nobody buys all five rungs in sequence, so there is no single stacked total to put in a board paper. Both figures are build cost only, with the run cost sitting on your own accounts on top, and either path can stop on 30 days' notice at the monthly rung.

Only at the specialist end, and by less than people expect. Our AI consultancy day rates are published in full: partner £1,560, senior practitioner £1,250 and associate £950, excluding VAT. The comparison you can check sits on the same G-Cloud 14 framework. A boutique card there, Daemon Solutions Ltd for 2023/24, lists Senior Consultant at £1,400, Principal Consultant at £1,650 and Managing Consultant at £1,800, and notes that rates may be higher for specialised Data, AI and ML skills. Our partner rate falls between their Senior and Principal grades. The large firms' cards carry no AI column at all, and because they price by SFIA level there is no technology premium to read off them.

About £1,294 a day. The AI Readiness Audit is thirty-four people-days over four weeks: James Rooney for five days, a senior operator for twenty and a build engineer for nine. Divide £44,000 across those days and the blended figure sits between our senior practitioner rate of £1,250 and our partner rate of £1,560, excluding VAT. It is sold as one fixed number rather than as days, so it does not move if the work turns out to need more of us than we judged. The rates it derives from are the three published at the top of this page, which is what makes the arithmetic yours to check rather than ours to assert.

Not on its own, because what you spend is people multiplied by days and the rate is only one of those three numbers. A supplier at twice our partner rate, with the same size team for the same weeks, costs twice as much. A supplier at our rate with twice the people for twice as long costs four times as much, and that second shape is the one that turns up on invoices. It is why every way in here is a fixed price with the team shape published beside it. Put your comparator's team size, blended rate and duration next to ours and the comparison does itself.

Yes. Every card in that table was re-verified against its own source document on 21 August 2026, and where a figure and its source disagreed, the source won. G-Cloud 15 was awarded on 6 August 2026 but publishes no pricing documents yet, so G-Cloud 14 remains both the live buyer catalogue and the newest published pricing these suppliers have. There are no newer figures to quote and we will not invent the gap. Every supplier name in the table links to the dated document its rates come from, so you can check the vintage yourself before you use any of it in a comparison.

Probably, which means the table understates the gap rather than overstating it. Framework rates are competitively tendered against volume commitments, and a supplier bidding for a place on a government catalogue bids at its keenest. Private-sector consultancy rates are commercially confidential and nobody publishes them, so these cards are the only competitor pricing that can be verified at all, which is why we use them. Almost none of our own work is public sector either. If a firm has quoted you privately, put their number beside their published card. The distance between the two is the most useful figure in your file.

The fee is flat, agreed in writing before the engagement starts. Twenty billable days a month is the convention the bands are derived from, not a quota you are invoiced against, which is why £35,000 to £55,000 for a design pair and £70,000 to £85,000 for a build team are published as monthly figures rather than as timesheets. What we commit to instead is measurable value every month, reported against the number it was meant to move, and a month that delivers none is reported as a failed month. Every monthly rung is cancellable on thirty days' notice either way.

We absorb it. The scope risk sits with us rather than with you, which is what the modest premium on a fixed price buys, so the audit stays at £44,000 and a proof of concept stays inside £20,000 to £55,000 whether the work lands where we judged it or over. The number is agreed in writing before anyone starts and it is not revisited at the end. Work that is genuinely outside what was scoped is a new piece of work, priced from the same published rate card, and you decide whether to buy it. That is the trade you are making when you take a fixed price rather than days.

Because free scoping is not free, it is priced into the rate. Large firms carry consultants between engagements and price that idle time into what the clients who do buy pay, and that is the single largest part of the difference between their card and ours. A free scope also ends in a proposal. What £44,000 buys is four weeks of a partner-led team of three that ends in working prototypes built against your own data inside your tenancy, an estimated run cost per candidate workflow, and a board readout. The genuinely free part is the thirty-minute call, which ends with a scope, a realistic range, or an honest none of the above.

A forward deployed engineer is billed at our published senior practitioner rate of £1,250 a day, excluding VAT, so a full-time month at twenty billable days is £25,000. Every engagement band here is derived from that rate card the same way. An Agentic Proof of Concept puts one or two of them alongside your engineers for two to four weeks at a fixed £20,000 to £55,000. A two-person Agentic Design Team is £35,000 to £55,000 a month, and an Agentic Build Team is three practitioners under partner oversight at £70,000 to £85,000 a month. You buy the engagement at a price agreed in writing, not the day.

No, and the table on this page is there so you can check that rather than take it. Three practitioners under partner oversight at £70,000 to £85,000 a month works out at £1,167 to £1,417 per person per day over twenty billable days, against the £2,600 to £2,855 the four Big Four cards top out at on the UK government framework. At mid grades several of those cards sit inside our own band, so check the grade you are actually buying. The fee is flat rather than billed against timesheets, agreed in writing before anyone starts, and cancellable on thirty days' notice either way.

You should know inside the first month, because the first month is the test rather than a mobilisation phase. The AI Readiness Audit is £44,000 fixed over four weeks and ends in working prototypes built against your own data, an estimated run cost per candidate workflow and a board readout, and a recommendation to stop is a valid outcome. On the live London specialty insurance engagement a two-week proof of concept took PDFs to business intelligence on Azure, covering ground the business had circled for roughly a year, and the client's engineer who paired on it finished 70% confident they could run it unaided.

Terms you can hold us to, and a standard you can read before you buy. The price is fixed and the scope risk sits with us, so the audit stays at £44,000 whether we judged the work right or not. You own all code, documentation and work product, the exit date is agreed at kickoff, and either side can leave on thirty days' notice. A month that moves no number you agreed is reported to you as a failed month. The method is published in full, and the engineering standard we build to, seventy-two rules with RFC 2119 severities, is open source. If the scope is settled and you need capable hands, a contractor is cheaper and the better buy.

Yes, and Tenhaw publishes every price so the number can go into your approval paper before the conversation rather than after it. The AI Readiness Audit is £44,000 fixed for four weeks, written into the Statement of Work before anyone starts, and it does not move with scope, so the figure you take to a budget holder is the figure you pay. Every published Tenhaw price excludes VAT, which matters where a delegated authority threshold is measured gross rather than net. What the paper still needs from your side is the approval route, because whether professional services sit under a different threshold from software is set by your own finance policy.

No, and deliberately. The AI Readiness Audit is a standalone Tenhaw fixed price with no obligation to continue, and a recommendation to stop is a valid outcome, so crediting it against a build would turn four weeks of evidence into a sales cost. You keep the working prototypes, the code in your repositories, the estimated run cost per candidate workflow and the costed plan whether you continue or not. Anything that follows is priced from the same published rate card at twenty billable days a month. Which rung that should be is the question the four weeks exist to answer, so it is not settled in advance.

Little on the rates, and the reason is structural rather than a negotiating stance. Tenhaw publishes three day rates, £1,560 partner, £1,250 senior practitioner and £950 associate, and every engagement band derives from them at twenty billable days a month, so a discount would be visible to everyone rather than a private concession. Scope and shape flex instead. An Agentic Proof of Concept spans £20,000 to £55,000 on how much of a workflow it covers, and Programme and Delivery Management starts at £18,000 a month for roughly three days a week of a senior lead. Where the budget is genuinely fixed, the useful question is which rung fits inside it.

More than most buyers put in the business case, and Tenhaw's terms set the expectation rather than leaving it to be discovered. You provide timely access to the people, systems, data and decision-makers named in the Statement of Work, and you nominate an executive sponsor empowered to make decisions within the agreed scope. Where delays in access materially affect the timeline we flag that in writing at the time rather than at the end, which is the term that stops it becoming an argument in month three. Add the engineers you want in the pairs on a build. The sponsor's own diary is usually the binding constraint rather than the engineers', and no contract term can free it.

One line, in most cases. A Tenhaw engagement is a signed Statement of Work carrying either a single fixed number, £44,000 for the AI Readiness Audit or £20,000 to £55,000 for a proof of concept, or a flat monthly figure such as £70,000 to £85,000 for a build team, so there is no rate table or timesheet schedule to encode. You contract with Tenhaw LTD, registered in England and Wales, company number 12735685, invoiced in sterling and exclusive of VAT, with pre-agreed expenses at cost. Whether your system wants the order raised for the whole engagement or month by month is a question for your own finance policy.

It follows the start date rather than a billing calendar of Tenhaw's. The AI Readiness Audit is four weeks at £44,000 fixed, so the cost lands wherever those four weeks sit, and monthly rungs are invoiced monthly in advance and payable within 30 days, which makes a year end an ordinary month boundary. Notice is thirty days either way, so a programme crossing April is only ever committed one month past the line. Where a split has to fall in a particular quarter, the milestone points on a fixed price are agreed in the Statement of Work. What no shape solves is budget that must be committed before a scope exists.

In sterling. Tenhaw LTD is registered in England and Wales, VAT registered and based in London, so you contract with a UK entity and are invoiced in sterling wherever the work happens. The published price list applies either way, so the AI Readiness Audit is £44,000 fixed and an Agentic Build Team £70,000 to £85,000 a month, all exclusive of VAT, with pre-agreed travel and subsistence charged at cost rather than marked up. Tenhaw runs engagements across the UK, Europe and the United States, with past delivery in Australia, the USA and Singapore. Outside the UK expect a UK-based team travelling to you, because there is no local office, so travel is the line to settle in scope.

Screening does not, because it is already in the price. Every Tenhaw practitioner is screened to BS7858 standard before they touch your estate, on every engagement. Insurance can. The cover is published as figures, professional indemnity £1m and employers' liability £10m, and where your supplier standard sets a higher limit for a specific engagement the increased cover is in place within three working days and the premium is priced in visibly rather than absorbed into an uplift. The MSA, SOW template, DPA and completed security questionnaires are standing documents, so nothing else in the assurance stack is chargeable. Whether anything is added at all is decided by your third-party risk standard.

Not on the monthly rungs. A Tenhaw Agentic Build Team is a flat £70,000 to £85,000 a month for three practitioners under partner oversight, and what those three point at is re-agreed each month against the value it is meant to move, so a change of priority changes the work rather than the invoice. The team does not get bigger, which is the thing that would change the number. On the two fixed-price ways in the scope is written down before the start, so re-sequencing inside it costs nothing and a genuinely different workflow is a separate engagement you choose whether to buy. Who holds authority to re-point the month is worth settling at kickoff.

Four numbers and a stop condition, all of which Tenhaw publishes so the paper can be written without a proposal cycle. The price: £44,000 fixed for the AI Readiness Audit, or £20,000 to £55,000 for a proof of concept. The year-one total for the shape you are proposing, £218,000 to £440,000 for a cautious start and £814,000 to £979,000 for an audit followed by a build team. The run cost, which sits on your own accounts and is estimated per candidate workflow by the audit. And the exit, thirty days' notice either way on any monthly rung. The benefit case is the part the paper still needs, because that comes off your own baseline.

Compare their top of range against our fixed number, not their bottom. An estimate is a forecast you carry; the Tenhaw figure is a price we carry, which is why the AI Readiness Audit is £44,000 and a proof of concept sits inside £20,000 to £55,000 with the scope risk on our side. So the arithmetic is their estimate plus whatever contingency their contract lets them draw, against one number. Find the two sentences in their terms that say whether the figure is a cap or an expectation and what triggers a change control. If theirs is a genuine cap for the same scope, that is a fair fight and worth taking.

Not until you strip the licences out, because there are none in ours. Every Tenhaw price is build cost only, what it costs to have our people in the room, and we resell no models, platforms or licences and mark none of them up, so no part of your run cost is revenue for us. The like-for-like comparison is their fees minus resold software against ours, with the same run cost put on both sides, billed to your own accounts inside your own tenancy where you keep any enterprise discount you have already negotiated. Sizing that run cost needs your actual workflows, which is what the audit's per-workflow estimate is for.

Three honest options at that number, all at published Tenhaw prices. The AI Readiness Audit at £44,000 fixed buys four weeks, two or three working prototypes against your own data inside your tenancy, and a costed plan, and it is the one that tells you what to do with next year's money. An Agentic Proof of Concept starts at £20,000 and takes one workflow to a working system in two to four weeks, leaving change. Or just under three months of Programme and Delivery Management at £18,000 a month. Which fits turns on whether you already know the workflow, because picking one before the estate has been read is the expensive kind of cheap start.

It should fall, if the engagement worked. Tenhaw engagements are built to leave. The exit date is agreed at kickoff, your engineers pair with ours throughout, and recruiting your permanent team is a stated deliverable, so year two should be a smaller Tenhaw line and a larger internal one. A common shape is governance only, Programme and Delivery Management at £18,000 to £35,000 a month, which is £216,000 to £420,000 across twelve months, against the £814,000 to £979,000 a first year of audit plus build team costs. The line that grows instead is run cost on your own accounts, and nobody can size that before the workflows exist.

Not by staffing a Tenhaw team more thinly. An Agentic Build Team is three practitioners under partner oversight at £70,000 to £85,000 a month, and the published bands price the people we bring, so the shape is fixed. Your engineers pair with ours rather than replace them, which is how the capability stays behind when we leave. If you genuinely have the build capacity and want discipline over it, the cheaper shape already exists in Programme and Delivery Management, which at £18,000 to £35,000 a month governs whoever is building, including when nobody building is from Tenhaw. Whether your people have the time as well as the skill decides between the two.

The Statement of Work carries the binding number, and Tenhaw's terms say so directly. Prices published on the site are indicative ranges to support budgeting, and the binding price for your engagement is the one stated in your SOW. At the fixed rungs the two are the same figure, because the AI Readiness Audit is £44,000 whatever the four weeks turn out to hold and a proof of concept is agreed inside £20,000 to £55,000 before anyone starts. Where a band exists, the SOW fixes one point in it and it does not move afterwards. Which point your engagement sits at is settled when the scope is written rather than on a call.

No, it sits inside the monthly fee. Recruiting your permanent team is an explicit Tenhaw deliverable rather than an add-on, and the terms carry no introduction fee and no permanent-placement conversion clause, because built to leave is worthless if leaving triggers an invoice. On an Agentic Build Team at £70,000 to £85,000 a month that means writing the specification you recruit against and running the hiring across months five to nine, while the work is live rather than after we go, so the people you hire inherit a working system. The final sixty days are a documented handover against an exit date agreed at kickoff. How long your own hiring process takes is the constraint we cannot shorten.

For the work performed and any committed costs incurred to that point, not the whole £44,000. Tenhaw's published terms let either side terminate a fixed-price engagement on written notice on exactly that basis, and you receive all work product produced up to termination, including documentation and any code already deployed in your environment. The terms say plainly that we would rather stop an engagement that is not working than continue it. Monthly rungs work differently, on thirty days' notice either way. What the number comes to depends on where in the four weeks you stop and which of the thirty-four people-days had already been committed.