The approach,
in full.
What you can expect, what you'll get, what we'll say no to, what it costs, and who you'll be talking to. No marketing — this is the operating manual.
Why this exists
Most consultancies sell you a Powerpoint, a six-month rollout, and a team you'll meet on the kickoff call. We sell you working software in weeks, built by people you'll know by name.
The shape of the work has changed. A small team with agentic AI can ship in two weeks what used to take a quarter. We're built around that fact — not bolted on to it.
We're not interested in being a big agency. We're interested in being a small one that does good work for a small number of businesses, and stays close to them.
The shape of an engagement
- 01 Listen Half a day on a call. No pitch deck. We want to understand what's slow, what's broken, what's costing you sleep.
- 02 Sketch Inside a week, you get a written plan: what to build, in what order, with what trade-offs. You can take it elsewhere if you want.
- 03 Build Fixed scope, fixed price. Daily check-ins, weekly demos. Live software in production within weeks, not months.
- 04 Stay close If it's worth keeping, we stay on a small monthly retainer — adding features, fixing things, watching for the next opportunity.
What we'll do
- Internal tools, ops dashboards, admin panels
- Data pipelines, integrations, ETL between the systems you already have
- Replacements for spreadsheet workflows that have outgrown spreadsheets
- Light-touch customer-facing apps and portals
- Agentic workflows — long-running tasks, document processing, classification
- Auditable AI — every action logged, reviewable, reversible
What we won't do
- Vague open-ended retainers with no deliverable
- AI strategy workshops without something built at the end
- Six-month projects we can ship in six weeks
- Anything we can't stand behind once it's in production
- Work we're not the right team for — we'll tell you and point you somewhere good
How we price
We price by engagement, not by hour. Discovery, builds, and retainers are each a fixed scope at a fixed fee — agreed up front, no surprises and no meters running.
What it costs depends on what you need and how fast. Tell us what you're trying to do; we'll come back inside a week with a number, a shape, and a timeline. If we're not the right fit we'll say so.
We're a small operation. We don't take more work than we can do well — usually two or three live engagements at a time. If we can't fit you in this quarter we'll say so, and tell you when we can.
Who we are
A small consultancy in Scotland. We came from the inside of a real software company through the AI transition — saw what's now possible, saw what people are still building the old way, decided to do something about it.
A yardang is a ridge of rock, carved by wind over thousands of years, that resists. We liked the metaphor — small, shaped by what we've been through, built to last.
Questions we get
Will my code be tangled up in your tools? [ + ]
No. Everything we build is yours — clean, documented, in your repo, on your infrastructure. Hand it to your next developer with confidence.
What if the AI gets it wrong? [ + ]
We don't ship things we haven't tested. Every agentic workflow is auditable, reversible, and gated by human review at the points that matter. We're not interested in shipping things that break quietly.
Can you work in person? [ + ]
Some of the time. We're in Scotland; we travel for kickoffs and for clients we work with over months. The rest is remote and asynchronous.
Do you sign NDAs? [ + ]
Yes — and we keep the names of clients off the site unless they ask us to put them up.
What's Vessel? [ + ]
A platform we're building for our own clients — a place to see what we've built for you, what's running, and what we'd recommend next. Quietly in development.
Still here?
Good. Tell us what you'd like to build. A few sentences is enough — we'll come back within the day.