Schema shape. What runs in the cloud and what doesn't. What you build against what you buy. Whether anyone can continue the work after the person who started it leaves.
None of these are engineering questions. All of them arrive later as an invoice, or as a rewrite you cannot afford. And by the time they are visible, the cheap moment to fix them has passed.
| Line item | As generated | After review |
|---|---|---|
| AWS Lambda bundle | 7 MB | 250 KB |
| Schema for one communication channel | 32 tables | 18, for all channels |
| Fields written, never read | billed both ways | removed |
| Shared naming standard | none | enforced |
Not one of these failed a test, broke a build, or raised an alert. That is precisely why they survive to production.
Scope
Before anything else
Every founder who buys advice faces the same silent problem: to get anything useful, you have to open the whole thing to a stranger. I have been on that side of the table, and I did not buy. So this comes first, in writing, every time.
I sign confidentiality agreements without negotiation. I do not sign non-compete clauses or assignments of intellectual property, because I am building my own company alongside this work — which is also why the second commitment above exists.
What a deliverable looks like
erDiagram account ||--o{ channel : owns channel ||--o{ conversation : carries message ||--o{ attachment : holds attachment { bigint stored_bytes "as encoded on disk" bigint source_bytes "what the user sent" }
Adding WhatsApp, SMS or social to this model adds rows, not tables. Channel-specific behaviour lives in kind and in the connector, never in the shape.
Two byte counts, not one. Encoding a payload for storage inflates it — base64 by roughly 37%. Systems that bill or meter from the stored size overcharge by that margin, silently, forever.
Delivered as Mermaid source: plain text, versionable, sitting in your repository next to the code it describes. Not a picture that goes stale in a folder.
Engagements
Half a day on the decisions currently in front of you, with the cost consequence of each path. Delivered: a decision record, three working days.
£900Half day
Entity design as a versionable Mermaid ERD, with a naming convention your team and your tooling both follow. Delivered: diagram and convention document, one week.
£1,200Fixed
Projected infrastructure spend against the architecture you have chosen, with the specific decisions driving each figure. Delivered: projection with drivers identified, one week.
£900Fixed
Session, data model, then cost projection — in that order, because a projection without a model is a guess. Delivered across two to three weeks. Split into two invoices if you prefer.
£3,000£2,700Sequence
For systems already built. Two days of diagnosis on what exists, what to keep, and what is quietly expensive. Delivered: prioritised report. Execution not included.
£2,400Two days
Most projects continue past the first session — but what continues is scoped during it, priced before it starts, and never open-ended. Nothing here is a retainer and nothing renews on its own.
The order matters more than the discount. A cost projection built before the data model is settled is arithmetic on a shape that is about to change — which is why I will not sell one without the other.
Remote or in person, London No production access required Two invoices above £2,000 No VAT — price is the price
Who is telling you this
Four decades of building systems, and of running the companies that had to pay for them.
An ISP built from nothing to ten thousand users. VoIP infrastructure moving half a million messages a day. A content management system built before WordPress existed. In every one of them I was both the person making the architecture decision and the person whose money it was.
That combination is the whole offer. Most technical advice comes from people who never carried the cost of being wrong, and most cost advice comes from people who cannot read the schema.
Today I run a multi-agent development stack in production — local models for proprietary code, cloud models where they earn their cost, continuous supervision throughout. I am building GOE with it, workforce infrastructure for the labour market, on a runway I have to defend every month. Every recommendation I give has been tested against that constraint first.
Each cycle arrived faster than the last and left behind a generation of systems nobody could maintain. This one accumulates that debt at machine speed — which is the only reason the hour before you start is now worth more than the month after.
Questions founders ask
A code review asks whether the code is correct. An architecture review asks what it will cost to run and to change. Schema shape, what runs in the cloud and what does not, what you build against what you buy, and whether anyone can continue the work after the person who started it leaves. None of these fail a test. All of them arrive later as an invoice.
It is the cheapest moment there will ever be. Before the first line is written, changing a decision costs a conversation. Eighteen months in, the same change is a rewrite you have to fund. Pre-seed and seed founders are exactly who this is built for, because runway is the constraint that makes the decision matter.
No. Technical due diligence is commissioned by an investor to assess a company, and it reports to them. This is commissioned by you, to make better decisions. Nothing is reported to a third party and nothing leaves the engagement.
No, and that is deliberate. Judging your market or your model is not the work, and I am not better placed to do it than you are. The work is making sure the way it gets built does not consume the money raised to build it.
Yes — whatever form you use, signed before the first conversation rather than on request. If anything you describe overlaps work already underway on my side, the session stops at that moment and the conflict is declared out loud. Client work never becomes content, with an NDA or without one.
Usually more, not less. A technical founder is deep inside the build and is the person least able to see the cost of the shape they chose — that is not a failing, it is how attention works. This is a second reading, not a replacement, and it is often the CTO who asks for it.
No. I diagnose and direct; your team executes. That keeps the scope fixed and the price honest, and it removes the incentive to keep finding work that needs doing. Execution is never included, and the price reflects that.
From £900 for a half-day decision session, £2,700 for the full sequence, and £2,400 to review a system already built. No VAT is added — the price shown is the price paid. Anything above £2,000 can be split into two invoices, one at the start and one on delivery.
Both. Sessions run remotely by default and in person in London on request. No access to your production environment is required at any point — the work is done from what you can safely show me.
Start here
This carries your name, email and message only. Send nothing confidential here — the NDA is signed before we talk, and everything of substance happens after it.