Questions buyers ask before they hire us

The Automation Audit is $500 and is credited to your build. Builds are fixed scope and fixed price: workflow automation from $1,500, internal tools from $3,000, multi-module systems from $5,000 and micro-SaaS products from $10,000. Larger programmes run up to about $150,000. Care plans after launch start at $50 a month.

No. Audits and builds are priced in writing before work starts. The only time-based offers are Extend, where a named specialist is booked in prepaid blocks of hours, and forward deployed engineers, which run month to month.

No. It is credited in full against a build you start within 90 days of the report. If you do not go ahead, you keep the report and can take it to anyone.

Tell us within 7 days of receiving the report and we refund the $500 in full. You can also cancel for a full refund any time before the first working session.

A deposit at kick-off, then a payment at each sprint review against acceptance criteria written before work starts. You can stop at the end of any sprint and pay only for the sprints completed.

The software subscriptions and AI model usage the system runs on. They are billed to accounts in your name, or passed through at cost and itemised, so you see the bills directly and keep them if we part ways. The audit estimates them for you.

We write down the change, its price and its effect on the timeline before doing the work, and you decide whether to go ahead.

One active request at a time from a queue with no limit, each delivered in a cycle of about a week. Requests can be new automations, changes, fixes or small internal tools inside the stack you already run. You can pause or cancel any month, and larger builds stay fixed-price projects.

A 30-minute discovery call at no charge. We ask about the work your team still does by hand, sketch what we would build and tell you whether an audit is worth it. If it is not, we say so.

Over one to two weeks we sit with the people doing the work and measure where the hours go. You get a written report with findings ranked by severity, each with a fixed price to fix, and the blueprint for the first build.

Most builds go live in 2 to 8 weeks. Work runs in two-week sprints with working software at every second Friday review, and small automations are often running inside the first sprint.

A named owner who takes part in sprint reviews, plus access to the people who do the work today. For the first call, the person who does the work and, if possible, the person who decides.

Yes. You can stop after the audit, after the blueprint or at the end of any sprint. Whatever has been built lives in your accounts, so you keep it.

Yes. Send yours or ask for ours. A data processing addendum is available for the build.

You do. Admin access, billing, app connections, code and documentation sit in accounts in your name, and that is written into every statement of work. If you stop working with us, the system keeps running.

Roles or service users that you create and own, limited to what the build needs. Access is restricted to the named engineers on your engagement, and you can see and remove it yourself at any time. When the engagement ends we hand back admin access and remove ours.

Credentials are kept in the orchestration platform’s encrypted store or your cloud’s secret manager, one per connection, and never written into workflows, repositories or spreadsheets. Keys are rotated at handover, when anyone with access leaves and whenever you ask.

No, we hold neither certification. We share our security practices and answer security questionnaires instead. We work as a processor under a written data processing addendum covering GDPR and UK GDPR, and we follow the India DPDP Act 2023.

The ones you already run where we can: your CRM, accounting software, store and helpdesk. For the system itself we use Zapier, Make, n8n, Airtable, Retool, Supabase, Vercel, and Claude or OpenAI through their business APIs, chosen by fit, volume and who on your team will maintain it.

Yes, through APIs with tools such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Shopify, QuickBooks, Xero, SAP, Tally, Zendesk, Slack and Microsoft 365, and with in-house systems that have an API or a database we can read. Older ERPs and desktop software without a usable API need a bridge, which takes more work and shows up in the price.

No. We are not a platform reseller and earn nothing from the tools we recommend, so we say so when a cheaper one will do.

Yes. The MVP audit is $500 and gives you a written report within a week. Fixes from that audit start at $1,500 with a 30-day warranty, and rebuilds start at $8,000.

No. We use business APIs whose published terms exclude training on customer data by default, and we never use your data to train or fine-tune a model ourselves. Model calls run through accounts in your name.

Only the fields a step needs, never whole records or tables. Card numbers, government IDs and any fields you mark as sensitive are removed before a call is made.

Not on anything that matters. Anything that moves money, contacts a customer for the first time, changes access or deletes data waits for a named person to approve it. Below an agreed confidence level, a step goes to a person instead of acting, and every model call and agent action is logged.

Yes. When data may not leave your infrastructure, open models run on servers you control and nothing is sent to a model provider. Smaller models suit classification, extraction and drafting, and we test quality on your data before committing.

Each AI step is tested on a sample of your real cases, with the accuracy and failure cases written down before it runs unattended. Model spend is capped per run and per month, and every AI step has a manual fallback and an off switch you control.

Sixty days of hypercare are included with every build. The engineers who built the system stay on call, fix what breaks and tune what the team asks for. Hypercare extends at no charge until the adoption number agreed up front is met.

Three tiers, from $50, $150 and $300 a month. Each includes monitoring, support with first-response times in writing and an allowance of small changes, from 1 hour a month on the first tier to 15 hours on the third. The higher tiers add a named engineer and, on the top tier, 24/7 cover for critical issues.

Yes, with 30 days’ notice by email. The plan ends at the end of the paid month and you keep the system. If we miss the response times in your plan, that month is credited.

No. After hypercare you can run the system yourself with the handover documentation, and everything stays in your accounts either way.

SmallBay Digital is a limited liability partnership registered in India, working with clients in many countries. Calls are booked in your time zone, and systems are set up in the data region you choose.

US dollars by default. We can invoice in your local currency at the rate on the invoice date.

Yes. Clients in India are quoted in rupees at about half the US price, and this site shows rupee prices when you visit from India.

Under our standard data processing addendum, with Standard Contractual Clauses or the UK Addendum for transfers from the EU and UK. Under the India DPDP Act, we transfer personal data only to countries not restricted by the Government of India.

Companies of 1 to 1,000 people whose teams lose hours copying data between tools, running the business on spreadsheets or waiting on approvals, in manufacturing, retail, services and software. Owners, operations leads and finance leads are the people we usually speak to first.

If your budget is under $1,500, the honest answer is often an off-the-shelf tool set up well, and we will tell you which one on a discovery call at no charge. We are also a poor fit if you want a strategy deck with nothing built, a vendor who holds the accounts and the code, or an AI agent that moves money or contacts customers with no person approving it.

Automation will not fix a process nobody agrees on. If the team agrees how the work should run, we build it. If not, the audit maps it first, and sometimes the right result is a clear reason not to build yet.

If SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification is a hard requirement, we are not the right supplier today, because we hold neither. Where a completed security questionnaire and a data processing addendum are enough, we can.