Frequently asked questions
Costs in rand, what happens to your data, and what happens if you walk away. If your question isn't here, ask us directly — you'll get the same register. For the words we use, there's a plain-English glossary.
Money
Our engagements are fixed-fee, in ZAR, with no hourly billing. A Substrate Proof — one painful workflow, captured and running — is R250,000 fixed over 6 weeks. Foundation (the full system for one part of the business) runs R600,000–R900,000; Practice (the whole operation) runs R950,000–R1.5 million; Federation (a group of companies) is priced per mandate, typically beyond R3 million.
Ranges are indicative — the exact price is fixed in your quote after the free diagnostic, and it doesn't move after that. Full breakdown on the pricing page.
BlitzBox — our on-premise AI appliance — costs R30,000 once-off plus R15,000 per month, with a R5,000 refundable EFT deposit to reserve a commissioning slot. The upfront covers the machine and its hand commissioning; the monthly covers the licence, signed updates, and the four always-on modules: Brain, Financial, Email, and Compliance. Detail on the BlitzBox pricing page.
Your data
The systems we build are designed to keep personal information where POPIA expects you to guard it: on your infrastructure, under your control. Every engagement that touches personal information runs under a written data processing agreement, with data residency documented.
Private doesn't mean automatically compliant — you still need the basics the Act asks of every business — but it makes the answers knowable: where the information is, who can see it, and what the AI did with it. The longer argument is in our essay POPIA and private AI. This is general information, not legal advice.
Your files, emails and history live on your own hardware — we never hold your data. On BlitzBox, business data stays on the machine at your premises; our licensing server only ever sees counts and aggregates, never customer business data. If you need nothing to leave the building at all, the BlitzBox Sovereign option runs open AI models locally on the box, so no outside AI service is involved. See inside BlitzBox.
No, by construction. The system drafts — emails, follow-ups, reconciliations — and a person in your business approves before anything goes out. Nothing reaches a customer or a system of record without a human signature, and every action is on the record.
Ownership
You do. Deliverables are MIT-licensed to you at handover and live in your accounts and on your hardware from the start. It's owned software — something your auditor can treat as an asset of the business, and a buyer can pay for one day. How that works: the asset page.
For a built system: it's yours. The deliverables are MIT-licensed to you and hosted in your accounts from day one, so nobody can switch it off remotely — what you lose by stopping is ongoing care, not the system.
For BlitzBox: if you cancel, the Box degrades gracefully through four documented stages over 28 days and ends as a static archive on your hardware. You keep your data forever.
Your choice, and no. The system works with Claude, GPT, Gemini — any capable AI model — and you can change models without rebuilding. The knowledge layer we build is the durable part: when better models ship, the same system gets better. On BlitzBox, the Sovereign option runs open models entirely locally.
Practicalities
A Substrate Proof takes 6 weeks. Foundation runs 8–12 weeks, and Practice 4–6 months. BlitzBox commissioning typically takes 5–10 working days from deposit to shipped — each machine is provisioned by hand.
No. BlitzBox arrives as its own machine — a custom-finished appliance commissioned by hand — and plugs in at your premises. For built engagements, the system runs on infrastructure you own or accounts you control: your servers or your cloud accounts, handed over with documentation and keys.
No — you ask it questions in plain English, the way you'd ask a colleague. We build, document and train; the handover includes runbooks and training docs written for your team. For larger engagements we do like having whoever runs your IT in the room early, because the system connects to systems they look after.
ChatGPT is impressive and generic — it knows nothing about your business. The systems we build know your files, your emails, your customers and your history, show where every answer came from, and do real work — drafting, chasing, reconciling — with your sign-off. And they're yours: on your hardware, under your agreements, not a subscription that forgets you when it ends. Start with how AI implementation works here.
Next step
Twenty minutes of plain questions about your business. You get the stage, the fixed price, and the first workflow we'd prove — before you commit a rand.
Begin the diagnostic