The refund clause. If a Build does not pay back inside six months - measured against the targets set in the Discovery plan and written into the engagement letter - the Build fee is refundable. The engagement letter defines exactly how payback is measured and how the firm's use of the software is verified. We have skin in the question of whether the Build was worth doing.
Crofter/How we work
Three stages. One workflow at a time. Everything on the table.
We do not run strategy workshops. We do not ship slideware. We pick one workflow that burns real time today, build the software for it inside your existing stack within eight weeks, and keep it alive on a retainer.
01Discovery
Two weeks. Fixed price. We sit with the operation.
Discovery is not a slide deck and it is not a workshop. A senior engineer - the same one who will lead the Build if there is one - spends two weeks inside the firm. We sit with the paralegals or the consultants or the compliance team while they actually do the work. We read the documents they produce. We look at the systems they use and the ones they have quietly given up on.
At the end of it we produce a Build plan: one named workflow, a proposed architecture that fits your stack, the specific integrations required, a fixed price, a fixed timeline, and the numbers we would expect back. If those numbers do not stack up, we say so and refund the unused part of the Discovery fee. If they do, the Build plan becomes the basis for the engagement letter - including the targets the refund clause is keyed to.
02Build
Four to eight weeks. One piece of software. Paid back, or refunded.
A Build is one piece of specialist software, wired into the tools you already use - Microsoft 365, Sage, Salesforce, practice management, your document store. Fixed price, fixed date. The lead engineer is named; the code we write is yours under the engagement letter; the architecture is documented in plain English.
We do not disappear at the end of a Build. We hand over to the Managed retainer, or to your own team if that is what you want, with a full architecture write-up and a tuning playbook. The code base is small enough to read in a sitting, on purpose.
03Managed
Monthly retainer. Not a ticket queue.
Software that is actually in use drifts. Models get better. Policies change. Your firm buys another firm. The Managed retainer is the economic centre of gravity of Crofter - it is how we stay a serious business and how you keep the software honest.
A retainer is one named senior engineer, a monthly tuning and monitoring cadence, and the right of first refusal on the next Build when you want it. There is no support tier labelled Bronze, Silver or Gold. There is one engineer, and they pick up the phone.
01Discovery
02Build
03Managed
Bars at contracted durations · Refund window 26 weeks from Build end
Bars at contracted durations. The refund deadline at Wk 34 is the worst case - Build end plus the 26-week refund window. Where a Build lands at four or six weeks rather than eight, the deadline moves in accordingly. Exact measurement is defined in the engagement letter.
04How we size a Build
Hours per event, events per year, loaded rate.
Discovery exits with three numbers: the hours the workflow currently takes per event, the number of events the firm processes per year, and the loaded cost of those hours. The arithmetic that follows is the basis for the Build fee and the refund clause. Done in the open, with the firm, not on a slide we keep to ourselves.
A worked example from current pipeline sizing, not a delivered case: for an HMRC investigation document pack at a mid-market tax advisory firm, the shape is roughly thirty hours of paralegal plus three hours of partner per complex enquiry. At a hundred enquiries a year, with a Build designed to take the paralegal portion down to around eight hours and the partner portion to one, the arithmetic supports a Build fee in the region of forty-five to sixty-five thousand pounds and a payback target inside six months. Whether your firm's numbers actually sit that way is the question Discovery answers; the engagement letter then binds us to the numbers we agreed.
05Commercial shape
Discovery
Workflow map, ROI estimate, Build-ready proposal. Two weeks, one senior engineer embedded.
£5k – £10k
Build
Fixed price. One specialist software build, wired into your stack. Four to eight weeks. Refundable against the Discovery-plan targets inside six months.
£35k – £75k
Managed
Monthly retainer. Tuning, monitoring, and the next Build when you want it. Named engineer.
£3k – £8k / month
These are real ranges, in plain text, because a marketing-page pricing gate is a tell. If your Build falls outside them we will say so on the first call.
06Compliance posture
Where UK defaults matter: in the plumbing, not the headline.
Crofter operates from the UK and defaults, on every engagement, to the posture a UK mid-market firm's finance director and compliance lead can sign off without a second meeting.
- Hosting
- UK-region by default. Azure UK South or AWS London. Data never leaves the UK unless you explicitly ask it to.
- Data protection
- UK DPA & UK GDPR. Signed DPA per Build, DPIA produced inside Discovery.
- Security
- Cyber Essentials Plus. Regular third-party pen-testing on production systems. SSO from your identity provider.
- Model providers
- Zero-training clauses. Your prompts and documents are never used for model training. Enterprise endpoints only.
- Engineers
- Named, UK-based. Senior practitioners, not offshore subcontracted. The person you meet is the person who builds it.
- Insurance
- Standard UK PII cover including cyber extension. Certificates available on request.
07What we will not do
Where we tell you to spend the money elsewhere.
We will not run a strategy workshop. We will not sell you a Copilot licence. We will not compete on price against a sub-£10k boutique - if that is the shape of the work, we will tell you where to go. We will not take on a Build without a named business sponsor and a workflow we can measure.
We will also tell you, during Discovery, if the right answer is an off-the-shelf vertical SaaS product rather than a bespoke Build. That has happened and it will happen again; it is better for both of us.
We pick one workflow that burns real time today, ship one piece of specialist software inside your existing tools within eight weeks, and keep it alive on a retainer. That is the offer.
If this reads like a fit, send a note. A first call is 30 minutes, on a video link, with no deck.