senior, per hour
Pricing · In GBP · Live for 2026
£8K to see the diagram. Then a fixed number for the build.
Every engagement starts with a £8K, 5-day audit. You leave week 1 with a 30-page brief, six ADRs, and a single fixed quote for the build. No day-rate clock. No discovery-call quote game. No proposals that arrive a fortnight late.
Below: real budgets we’ve signed in the last 6 months.
The whole pricing page in one frame
Three rates. That’s the menu.
Most studios make pricing a discovery-call game so they can anchor higher. We made it three sentences instead, so you can decide whether we’re in your range before sending an email.
Senior, hourly
The on-demand tier.
£20–35
/per hour
Send a 5-line brief
What’s included
- £20-28 for web, mobile, frontend, design systems
- £28-35 for AI engineering and infrastructure
- The architecture hour with Mohit is £180
- Weekly invoice. No retainer minimum past the first month
- Right when your team can handle most of it and you need a senior for the rest
Dedicated pod
Most agency and startup builds sit here.
from £8K
/per week
Send a 5-line brief
What’s included
- 2 seniors + 1 principal-review for £8K
- 3 seniors at £14K. 5 seniors at £22K
- Ring-fenced, weekly invoice, 30-day notice either side, same team end-to-end
- Right when you’ve sold a 3 to 6-month build and need senior delivery without permanent headcount
White-label retainer / advisory
Quarterly architecture review with your MD.
from £5K
/per month
Send a 5-line brief
What’s included
- £5K monthly advisory
- £12K standing capacity
- £24K ring-fenced pod
- Invoiced monthly on the 1st
- Right when you’re building an engineering arm or want a second senior voice on your team
One table. No fine print.
Every line that costs us money on a project. Some are included at every tier, some only at the higher ones, and some are always extra and named upfront so the invoice doesn’t surprise you.
- 01
Included at every tier.
HourlyPod / weekRetainer - 02
Pod and retainer tiers.
Pod / weekRetainer - 03
Included at every tier.
HourlyPod / weekRetainer - 04
Pod and retainer tiers.
Pod / weekRetainer - 05
Included at every tier.
HourlyPod / weekRetainer - 06
Pod and retainer tiers.
Pod / weekRetainer - 07
Included at every tier.
HourlyPod / weekRetainer - 08
Retainer tier only.
Retainer - 09
Add-on on hourly, included above it.
Hourly · add-onPod · includedRetainer · included - 10
On every contract, length scales with the tier.
Hourly · 7dPod · 30dRetainer · 60d - 11
Passed through at cost. Named in the contract.
At costNamed upfront
REAL BUDGETS WE’VE SIGNED
Five projects. Five honest invoices.
Anonymised by contract, signed by founders and account directors who’ll get on a reference call if asked. Each card is the real budget, the real timeline, and what shipped at the end of it.
£38K · Document extraction MVP
6-week sprint, fixed scope. Founder walked in with a Notion doc and £180K pre-seed. 6 weeks later: working extraction tool, document-level audit, three paying customers signed in month two. Series A closed at £3.4M, 8 months on.
£186K · Merchant onboarding spine
14 weeks, pod of 3 + principal. 4,000 merchants in 6 months. KYC, payments, fraud, tenant model. Audit week, written trade-off log, FCA-aware schema. Pod at £14K/week + principal review. FCA visit passed on first review. CTO hired against our codebase.
£24K / month · Agency engineering team
Standing capacity, ongoing since 2023. London-based brand agency. We’re named “Engineering Team” on their team page. 3 ring-fenced seniors, 1 principal review, quarterly review with their MD. Currently behind 8 of their client retainers.
£62K · NHS triage MVP
8 weeks, pod of 2 + AI principal. Non-technical founder. £120K Innovate UK grant. NHS-compliant data handling. IG team approved on first review. Includes RAG, evals, audit trail. £1.2M Innovate UK follow-on closed.
£5K / month · Architecture-only advisory
Advisory, ongoing since 2024. UK SaaS, £9M ARR, in-house team of 11. Weekly standup with their CTO, fortnightly architecture review, quarterly review with the founder. The call before every expensive call. Two avoided rebuilds in 18 months. Six-figure savings each.
THE HONEST COMPARISON
We’re not the cheapest. Here’s where we’re cheaper anyway.
The hourly rate isn’t the price. The price is the rate times the rework, the time-zone friction, the hidden management overhead, and the rebuilds you pay for in year two. Here’s the comparison written plainly.
Offshore body shop
£8 – £15 / hr
- Pitch: senior. Reality: junior pool, rotation common.
- Time-zone: handoff costs you a day per cycle.
- Architecture decisions reactive, not on paper first.
- Rewrites by your in-house senior eat the margin you saved.
- Year-two rebuild often costs more than the original build.
Empyreal
£20 – £35 / hr
- Senior-only on the spine. Same names start to finish.
- 16 hours of working coverage daily (London + Rajkot).
- Architecture call in week one, on paper, with you in the room.
- 30-day walk-away clause, both ways. Documented handover at exit.
- Architecture decisions investors check, defended in year two.
London senior in-house
£85K + benefits · / yr
- 9 months to hire if you’re lucky. Three months to ramp up.
- Benefits, equipment, holiday, sick leave, parental.
- One senior, one perspective. No second voice on architecture.
- Termination friction. Hard to flex up or down.
- Long-term right answer past 18 months. Wrong answer at month one.
PAYMENT TERMS + INVOICING
Built for your CFO. And your runway.
Procurement-friendly. Net-15 default. Currency in GBP, with USD, EUR, and AUD on request at the previous month’s close. PO numbers welcomed. We work with founders who run their own books and finance teams who need every invoice to match a SAGE entry.
01
Net-15 default
Hourly: weekly invoice, Net-15. Pod: weekly invoice, Net-15. Retainer: monthly on the 1st, Net-15. Earlier payment discount on request.
02
Milestone payments for sprints
Fixed-scope MVP sprints split into three milestones: kickoff / week 3 / completion. Founders with tight runway can spread further; we’ll structure around your raise calendar.
03
Multi-currency on request
GBP default. USD, EUR, AUD invoiced on request at the close of the previous month’s rate. SWIFT, ACH, SEPA, BACS, and Wise all accepted.
04
VAT, where it applies
UK VAT applies for UK clients. Reverse-charge mechanism for EU clients. No VAT for non-EU clients. VAT number on the invoice; HMRC-compliant.
05
PO numbers + procurement
PO numbers welcomed. Procurement onboarding (vendor forms, security questionnaires, MSA review) handled the same day.
06
Refund clause
Architecture audit refundable if you don’t find it useful (full week 1 refund clause, written into every audit MSA). Pod payments cover work completed; we never charge for time not delivered.
What happens when things change
Scope changes. Pivots. Pauses. Exits.
Real engagements move. The contract has to move with them, in writing, with the cost named, before anyone agrees to anything. Here’s how we handle the four most common moments.
Mid-sprint
Scope change mid-sprint.
Every change request goes to a Friday call with your AD or founder. We name the trade-off in writing, cost it in hours, and present two options. Drop something to keep the date, or slip the date to absorb the change. Your call, signed in writing before we move on it.
Pause
Pause for a month or two.
Hourly and pod: 30-day notice, work pauses cleanly with written handover. Retainer: 60-day notice with a 50% drop-to-capacity option you can use twice a year. The relationship doesn’t die when the quarter goes quiet.
Exit
Walk-away mid-project.
30-day walk-away clause on every contract, both ways. Written handover at the end: documented codebase, decision log, credentials in your secrets manager, exit-interview note. No clinging, no penalty, no hostage code.
Round slip
Round delayed, milestone shifts.
Milestone payments are structured around your runway and round timeline, not ours. If a round slips, we reshape the milestones in writing, the same week we hear about it. Three founders raised three weeks late in the last 18 months. All three sprints finished.
The five we get every week.
Straight answers to the questions buyers send before they send a brief.
The rate covers seven years of senior production experience, not a junior’s first project. The cheaper hourly rate elsewhere usually shows up as rework, a year-two rebuild, or a CTO hire to clean up a codebase nobody documented. The comparison table on this page is the maths we ask buyers to do before signing.
Yes, transparently. Hourly tier drops 5% after the first 3 months at 30+ hours/week. Pod weekly rate drops 8% on contracts over 12 weeks. Retainers locked for 12 months take 10% off. No volume discount we wouldn’t publish on this page.
Only on a small fixed share of the engagement, only after the sprint has shipped, only with proper paperwork. Equity-in-lieu is a tax problem and a relationship problem when it’s used to fund a whole sprint. We’d rather take the cash and earn the equity later, if it’s ever the right shape.
Fixed-scope sprints are fixed. If we miss the date because of a call we made, we extend the sprint at our cost to close the gap. If the date shifts because the scope changed, we’d have flagged it in writing before week three with two costed options. No surprise overruns, ever.
Yes. Vendor onboarding forms, security questionnaires, ISO/SOC 2 audit packs, MSA reviews handled inside a working week. We’ve onboarded into 40+ procurement systems since 2019 including UK enterprise, US Fortune 500, and EU regulated industries.
Empyreal Infotech
SEND THE 5-LINE BRIEF
Stop comparing studios on a slide deck
Send the 5-line brief. We’ll quote inside 48 hours.
Tell us what you’re shipping, when it has to ship, what your budget envelope looks like, and where your team is sitting now. A real number comes back with named seniors, a written scope, and a milestone calendar your CFO can paste straight into the next board pack.
A REAL NUMBER, NOT A RANGE
Named seniors, a written scope, and a milestone calendar your CFO can paste into the board pack.
EVERY CONTRACT, BOTH WAYS
All numbers in GBP · Net-15 default · 30-day walk-away on every contract.
In context
See it in context.
A look at the kind of pricing surface we hand over — real screens, real data, documented and yours from day one.