Fixed-fee floors, quoted on the first call.
Three engagement shapes, three published floors. The exact quote is fixed on the first call before any commitment. We never bill hourly. There are no expansion clauses.
Discovery Sprint
Scoped problem, structured deliverable, decision-ready output. The cheapest path to a defensible answer when the question is bounded.
Typical: Cloud go/no-go assessment · NFR response · architecture critique · technology selection memo.
Rapid PoC
Working demonstration plus an evidence-based go / no-go memo. For when the right answer can only be reached by building something small.
Typical: MCP control layer over an existing API · RAG pipeline over your knowledge base · self-hosted LLM eval · edge-ML feasibility check.
Fractional CTO
A senior architect on call. Sounding-board for the in-house team, RFP due diligence, second-opinion reviews, regulatory-clock monitoring.
Typical: CRA / NIS2 readiness oversight · architecture decisions where the team is strong but missing one area of depth · pre-investment technical diligence.
Where engagements actually land. Most no-complication engagements close at or within 10–15% of the floor. The ranges in the next section show where one or more of the four named complications move the quote — and by how much. Strict-deadline and legacy-modernisation engagements account for most of the upward movement.
When the engagement carries one of these characteristics, the quote moves up.
- Strict regulatory deadline. CRA Cliff 1, NIS2 transposition window, procurement-RFP due date inside three weeks — anything that requires compressing the engagement into a tighter calendar than the engagement shape would normally allow.
- Legacy modernisation. Reading code that no original author is around to explain — VB6, Classic ASP, old PHP, stored-procedure-heavy SQL — adds time at the front of the engagement before any analysis can begin.
- Multi-stakeholder coordination. When the engagement requires aligning more than three internal teams or external parties, the coordination overhead becomes the bottleneck.
- High-volume documentation. Engagements that produce two-hundred-plus pages of audit-defensible evidence (CRA readiness packs, NFR catalogues with deep-dive annexes) cost more than the standard engagement shape.
In those cases a Discovery Sprint typically lands at €8–12k, a Rapid PoC at €20–35k, and a Fractional CTO retainer at €7–10k/month. The exact number is fixed on the first call and does not move during the engagement.
Hourly billing aligns the consultant's incentive with making the engagement longer. We do not work that way. Every engagement quotes a fixed fee on the first call, before any commitment, and the fee does not move during the engagement.
The fixed fee carries a modest premium over an equivalent hourly engagement — typically 40–60%. The premium is real value, not a markup:
- Scope-risk transfer. If the engagement turns out harder than expected, that is our problem, not the buyer's bill.
- Methodology assets. Each engagement starts from a small library of named techniques (Position of Record, propagation matrix, four-category cost taxonomy, L / I / B classification) that took years to develop. You rent the library, not the labour to build it.
- Senior-only delivery. No junior delivery team, no offshore handoff. The person you talk to on the first call is the person doing the work.
- Reputation underwrites the work. The deliverable carries the Thinking Machine brand. That alignment is what protects the buyer from a sloppy artifact.
Travel beyond Zagreb if the engagement warrants an in-person session (which it usually does not). Third-party legal review of contracts on the buyer's side. Cloud or software licensing if the engagement involves building anything. Out-of-scope work is declared explicitly at engagement framing and is, by definition, out of scope.
If the engagement uncovers a bigger problem than what was scoped, we will tell you. We will not solve it through the same engagement.
The first thirty minutes is on us — and the quote comes back the same day.