You're not buying a deliverable. You're booking a team.
01Team — who is actually on it, by name.
02Duration — how long they stay before it's yours.
03Depth — how much is understood before making starts.
A line-item quote answers one question: what will I receive. It's the wrong question, because the file you receive is the last five percent of the work. The other ninety-five is judgement made weeks earlier by people you never met.
So we describe engagements the way they actually behave. Team, duration, depth. Change any one of those and you get a different piece of work — a longer feature list does not.
Nothing on this page is a menu. It's a description of shapes, so that by the time we speak you already know roughly where you sit and we can spend the call on your problem instead of on qualifying you.
Every engagement, at every size, is run by the people who will do the work. That is not a premium tier. It's the operating model.
Project. Retainer. Embedded.
Same studio, same people. What differs is your claim on our calendar — and therefore how the relationship behaves once the first deadline passes.
Project
A defined outcome with a defined end
Right when the thing is knowable
Shape: a lead who owns the creative or technical direction, the specialists the work genuinely needs, and a producer holding the schedule. Nobody is on the invoice who isn't on the work.
Contents: a discovery pass, a production block with named milestones, delivery, and the handover that lets your team run it without calling us.
Right when the thing is knowable — a film, a shoot, an identity, a site, a defined product build.
Retainer
A standing share of the studio's month
Right when output is continuous
Shape: a reserved block of studio capacity held for you each month, with a named lead — and the scope flexes with the month: a shoot in one, a build in the next.
Contents: a rolling backlog you set the priority on, a fixed review cycle, and work drawn down against the reserved block rather than re-quoted every time.
Right when output is continuous — a content cadence, a product that keeps shipping, a brand that needs guarding rather than launching.
Embedded team
Our people inside your organisation
Right when you have momentum and a gap
Shape: named people who work in your tools, your stand-ups and your repository, at an agreed weekly commitment, for an agreed number of months.
Contents: you hold product direction and priority. We hold craft direction and the standard — the part that quietly erodes when a team scales through contractors.
Right when you have momentum and a gap: a team that can ship but can't direct, or can direct but can't shoot.
The same studio, at four depths.
Budget doesn't buy you a longer list. It buys seniority on the room, research before making, weeks on the calendar, and how directly you reach the people doing the work.
Read the four bands left to right as one continuous move — from focused and fast to embedded and accountable. There is no tier where you get a junior and a template.
None of the bands below carries a price. The structure is what is published here. Nothing on this page is a quote or an offer.
Band 1
Entry — focused
- Team shape
- A lead and one specialist. Small on purpose, not by shortfall.
- Duration
- Weeks. One outcome, delivered, handed over, finished.
- Strategy depth
- The brief is interrogated, not expanded. Enough research to make the right thing once.
- Access
- Direct to the lead. One standing check-in a week.
Band 2
Considered — produced
- Team shape
- A lead, a producer, and the specialists the work calls for. Crew scales to the idea.
- Duration
- A production block with named milestones and a real schedule behind them.
- Strategy depth
- A discovery phase before making starts, and the findings are written down.
- Access
- The working team in a shared channel. No account manager in the middle.
Band 3
Integrated — two pillars
- Team shape
- A senior director alongside an engineering lead. The shoot and the build planned in the same room.
- Duration
- Multi-phase, across a quarter or more, with review gates between phases.
- Strategy depth
- Research, definition and testing are budgeted as work rather than absorbed into evenings.
- Access
- Standing time with the people who shoot and the people who ship.
Band 4
Partner — embedded
- Team shape
- A dedicated group held for you, with studio leadership sitting on the work.
- Duration
- Ongoing, reviewed on a fixed cycle rather than re-sold every quarter.
- Strategy depth
- We're accountable for the direction, not only for executing someone else's.
- Access
- Founder level. Your roadmap sits inside our planning, not beside it.
Bar width indicates relative depth of commitment — it is not a price, a ratio, or a multiplier.
If you're earlier-stage
Band 1 exists for you. It is not a consolation prize.
The same senior hands, end to end. A smaller problem and a shorter clock. What a focused engagement leaves out is months of discovery — not craft, not seniority, and not care.
The band you start in is not the band you stay in. Starting focused is the most common sensible way in, and nothing about it makes the next engagement harder.
—In production
The same hands, start to finish.
No account team and no handover. The people who scope the work are the people who make it, which is why what was agreed in the treatment is what ships.
A starting figure where one is honest. A model where it isn't.
Production has a floor you can state before you meet anyone. A crew is a crew. A shoot day is a shoot day. A grade takes the time it takes. Publishing that floor costs us nothing and saves you a call you didn't want to make.
Software has no such floor. A web app, a mobile app, an AI product or an automation costs whatever its hardest requirement costs, and we cannot know that requirement before we understand your product.
So for engineered work we publish the model — how the number is arrived at — rather than a number. A figure invented before the conversation would be a guess wearing the clothes of a quote. You would plan against it. It would be wrong. That's worse than saying so.
Film & Video
Starting figure published
A shoot has real costs before anyone gets creative: crew, days, kit, post. There's a defensible floor, so we'll state it.
Photography
Starting figure published
Same logic, tighter. A day is a day, whatever it's for — what changes above the floor is scale, usage and art direction.
Brand & Digital
Figure for identity. Model for platforms.
An identity system has a knowable shape. The platform that carries it is software, and follows the rule beside it.
Technology
Model published, not a number
Websites, web apps, mobile apps, AI products, software, automation, 3D and WebGL. Scoped after a conversation, then fixed in writing.
Starting figures for the production disciplines are not published here, and no figure shown or implied should be treated as final.
Three steps. One of them is a fixed number.
No pitch theatre, no deck of stock photography, and no figure that quietly grows between the proposal and the invoice.
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Step 01
Conversation
Thirty minutes, no deck. What you're trying to make, when it has to exist, and what's already been decided. If we're the wrong studio for it, you'll hear that here rather than three weeks later.
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Step 02
Scoped proposal
Written and specific, carrying a fixed figure for the scope it describes — not a range, not an estimate that drifts. It names the team, the duration, the milestones, and exactly how a change in scope is handled if one comes.
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Step 03
Engagement
Staged milestones with something reviewable at each one. You approve a stage before the next is worked, so you always know what exists and what it cost to get there.
The proposal is the first real piece of work we do for you, and it is unpaid. That's deliberate — if it isn't sharp enough to be useful on its own, we haven't understood the problem yet.
Straight answers.
What if my budget is below Band 1?
Say so on the form. Sometimes the answer is one smaller piece of the same work, done properly. Sometimes it's an honest pointer to someone better suited. What you won't be offered is a big project stripped for parts and sold at a discount — that's how work goes bad and reputations go with it.
Do I need to know my budget before contacting you?
No. "Not sure yet" is a real option on the enquiry form and it isn't a trap. Bring the problem and the deadline — the band is usually obvious within one conversation.
Can one engagement cover both film and software?
That's the reason the studio is built this way. A single engagement can carry a shoot and a platform under one director and one engineering lead, with no handoff between two vendors who blame each other in April.
Is the proposal figure actually fixed?
Fixed for the scope it describes. If the scope changes — and sometimes it should — the proposal states in advance how that's priced and approved. No invoice should ever be a surprise.
Can we start small and grow?
Band 1 into a retainer is a normal path, and so is a project that becomes an embedded team. Starting focused costs you nothing later; it usually makes the second engagement sharper because we already know your business.
Who actually does the work?
The people you meet. We take on work selectively — few enough projects at a time that this answer stays true at every band, including the entry one.
Tell us what you're trying to make.
You don't need a brief. A paragraph and a deadline is enough for us to tell you which shape this is and roughly which band it sits in.
Budget unknown is an option on the form. So is "below Band 1" — it's an answer we can work with, not a door closing.