AI Engineering Assessment

Two weeks at the published floor for the AI engineering practice. The floor covers up to 3 distinct systems, models or accounts; beyond that, each further block of up to 3 systems adds 10 percent, capped at 30 percent, and more than 12 systems needs a scoping call.

Two weeks buys the practice's shortest shapes, chosen at the scoping call: an architecture review of a system or a design, an honest assessment of what is salvageable in an existing system with both paths costed, or the Evaluation harness (the site scopes it at 2–4 weeks, build) at its two-week end. The harness is the shape with a published week range; the architecture review and the salvageable assessment are sized against the two-week floor at that call, and where a system is larger than two weeks of senior time can honestly cover we say so then and quote the work as an engagement rather than taking the fixed fee. Taking over a prototype that reached production faster than intended is a common starting point; the assessment occasionally concludes that a component should be replaced rather than repaired, and we say so plainly and cost both paths.

The system is read against the design constraints the practice states: guardrails outside the model rather than instructions inside the prompt, authorization enforced at query time by the index rather than by the ingestion job, side effects that are idempotent so a retrying agent cannot double-charge, double-send or double-delete, and substitutable inference, where model choice is a configuration decision with a measurable answer rather than a rewrite.

Fixed fee and fixed window, scoped with a written deliverable and an end date agreed before it starts. No retainers you cannot exit and no findings held back for a follow-on sale. We take no percentage of savings and hold no reseller margin on any platform we might recommend. Work produces running code in your repositories, under your review process, with your team involved throughout: the goal is that they own it fluently when we leave, and we are not interested in becoming a dependency you cannot remove. Deliverables include the harness, the code and the reasoning, so if you never call us again, everything still works.

The price is the published floor for the practice and its status is confirmed: PinkCloud quotes from this figure. It is a floor rather than a flat fee — the scope described above buys it, and while we are scoping, more systems, an expedited start or compliance evidence quote above it, so a binding quote can come out above an indicative one. The floors are published so you can rule us in or out without a call, and engagements are quoted against scope, never against what we think you can pay. The floor is priced for senior-only staffing: the team is small and senior by deliberate constraint, and the people who scope the engagement are the people who deliver it. The practice floors sit deliberately above the entry product rather than being discounted to meet it. An indicative quote is valid 14 days and is never binding; a binding quote follows a scoping call and is approved by a named person at PinkCloud.

Assumptions: senior-only staffing; remote delivery unless on-site is agreed; the client provides access within 3 business days of the start; taxes excluded, as the Service offer published on the practice page also states; the fixed fee is an agreed budget of 160 hours of senior time at our published hourly rate.

What the fee buys, and what happens if the work does not fit. Two rules apply at two different times and both hold. Before you sign, while the scope is being sized, the figure is a floor: more systems, an expedited start or compliance evidence quote above it. Once you have signed, the quoted fee and the two-week window hold: if the agreed work proves larger than we estimated, the scope flexes rather than the fee, what comes out is agreed in writing with you, and an overrun is never billed by the hour. The hourly rate is reached only by adding scope — a change request or a separate engagement, agreed in writing before it starts — never by the agreed work turning out to be bigger.

Approach: we are deliberately model-agnostic and design for substitution, with an abstraction at the inference boundary, an evaluation set that makes swapping measurable, and no framework in the critical path we would not be willing to fork. Build engagements get security review as part of the work, not as an upsell.

Confidentiality and staffing: the roster staffing the work is disclosed under NDA before you sign anything. No client is named without written permission and case studies are anonymized by default. What you send is shown only to the people at PinkCloud who will answer, and is never published, used in marketing or shared with other prospects. We do not backfill an engagement with people who were not in the scoping call; when we are full we say so and offer a date.

If a prior Exposure Review turns into a larger engagement, the site states that its fee comes off the first invoice, while the pricing rules list crediting the entry fee against a follow-on as a human decision and a decision record each.

Payment, cancellation and liability terms are agreed in the engagement contract before work starts.