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Engagement Process
How a typical engagement starts, what the Paid Scoping deliverables look like, and what walking away looks like.
How does a typical engagement start?
Discovery call (30-45 minutes, no charge) → Paid Scoping ($700-$2,800, 1-2 weeks, written go/no-go and 4 deliverables) → if go, project engagement signature + kickoff. About 25% of Paid Scopings recommend not building, in which case you keep all four written artifacts and walk away with full discovery for under $3k.
What are the four Paid Scoping deliverables?
Business Alignment memo, Data Readiness Scorecard, Architecture and Eval Plan, and Cost Model with risk register. Take them to your CFO, your CDO, your in-house team, or a different vendor — they are designed to be useful regardless of who builds. See /resources/ai-project-scoping-checklist/ for the full framework.
What if Scoping recommends not building?
You keep the four written artifacts. We typically offer a free 30-minute follow-up 90 days later to re-evaluate the recommendation when conditions change. The Scoping fee is not refundable, but the deliverables are designed to outlast the recommendation.
Can we start with a small pilot?
Yes — that is what Paid Scoping is. For "demo before commit" buyers, we also occasionally run a 2-3 week "vertical slice prototype" engagement (typically $7k-$15k) that ships a working end-to-end thin path of the agent. This is rarer than Paid Scoping because the vertical-slice does not produce written deliverables that survive the engagement.
How do change requests work mid-engagement?
Two-week increments. Anything inside the next increment is in scope. Anything bigger is a written change request priced against the architecture decision record. We do not absorb scope changes into existing increments silently — that is what causes the 18-week project that ships at month 14.