One team. One platform. One engagement.
Working with Tippt isn’t a project, and it isn’t a retainer. It’s one accountable team, holding one prebuilt platform, through a single engagement that has a shape. Below, in order: how an engagement is shaped, how the work actually moves, and who’s doing it.
How an engagement is shaped
A four-step ladder. Every step earns its way to the next.
Each step has its own commercial mechanics — shown as pills below. License is the recurring fee for Tippt Core itself. Configure is the project-shaped build work that wires solution shapes for your domain. Operate is the recurring managed-service tail.
Ambiguity isn’t a reason to wait — it’s a reason to start small with a deadline. Every engagement enters at Step 1 and earns its way right. No one signs a Build without a Sprint that worked. No one moves to Operate without a Build that landed.
- Step 11–2 weeks
Orientation
ConfigureA short, structured conversation series that ends with a written map: where your problem sits across the eight operational shapes, where the leverage is, and what the smallest useful first move looks like. Sometimes the answer is that you don't need us.
Nominal fixed fee, credited back against any Sprint that follows.
- Step 23–4 weeks · hard deadline
Value Sprint
LicenseConfigureOne narrow slice of one solution shape, standing up on Tippt Core. Real data and real users where possible, a real demonstration at the end. The point isn't to ship production — it's to close enough distance that both sides know whether a full Build is worth doing.
From US$10k flat — scoped together, not priced per artefact. A recent Sprint produced three working prototypes inside the floor price.
- Step 38–14 weeks · fixed scope
Solution Shape Build
LicenseConfigureThe full thing. One solution shape — configured, integrated, populated, and live for real users. Sold per shape, not per day. Includes the License for the duration and the first three months of Operate.
- Step 4Rolling monthly
Operate & expand
LicenseOperateRunning it after go-live: measurement, content refresh, prompt evolution, integration drift, on-call. The change budget tapers as your team picks up more. The next solution shape gets added when it has earned its place, not before.
We price against the cost of nothaving the capability — not the days it takes to build it. A Sprint that lets you commit (or walk away) before a six-figure decision is worth more than its delivery cost. If price is your first question, we’re probably not the fit. If distance closed is, we usually are.
For consultancies, agencies and operators where the work compounds across many of their own clients: a standing relationship — discounted License, retained Configure capacity, joint Operate. Sometimes structured with outcome milestones where upside is genuinely shared. There is always a base fee — we don’t do pure success-fee work.
- No day rates. They anchor the wrong conversation.
- No exact prices on the page. Bands filter; specifics live in proposals.
- No pure success-fee work. Signals we'd work for free if pushed. We won't.
- No hourly anything. Operate is a monthly fee plus change budget, not timesheets.
How each build matures
From cheap probe to deployed reality. Effort proportional to what's been proven.
PoC — direction
Is this the right way?
The cheapest probe to de-risk a direction, not a build. Throwaway. Success is a confident yes/no, not a working product.
PoC — feedback
Does it hold in real hands?
A second probe gets the idea in front of real users. Still disposable. Success is learning, not adoption.
MVP — pilot
Is it usable for real work?
First version built to be used, scoped to the smallest valuable thing, hardened enough to run a pilot with real stakes.
Deployed v1 →
Is it real, and improving?
In production, owned, iterating. v1 is the start of the product's deployed life, not the finish line.
The last mile lives in the later stages:up to MVP it’s about being right; from pilot onward it’s about being dependable — the part everyone else treats as someone else’s job.
Who's doing the work
One accountable team. Systems thinkers. Four principles.
Every handoff is a translation, and every translation loses something
Traditional delivery hands strategy to a PM, to engineers, to designers — and back. Specs drift. Intent flattens into tickets. Most of the cost and most of the failure live in the seams between roles, not in the roles themselves. At Tippt those roles are one. The person who understood the problem is the one shipping the fix — no re-briefing, no inter-functional queue. Remove the handoffs and you don’t fix the structural failure modes; you never have them.
We model the system before we reach for a tool
We’re systems thinkers. Faced with a problem, we don’t start from the fashionable default — we decompose it, map how the parts actually relate, and only then choose the approach that fits. Where another firm reaches for whatever pattern is in vogue, we pick the one the structure asks for — a knowledge graph over naïve retrieval when the relationships are the problem. Not the convenient tool. The matched one.
Agents do the heavy lifting, so the team stays small
At every step the work is parallelised by AI agents — broad research, comparative analysis, decomposition into buildable units. That’s why a Tippt team is small for the work it does, why the cadence inside a Sprint stays fast, and why the demand on your team is concentrated at decision points rather than spread across endless review meetings. Speed comes from leverage, not hustle.
The honest way to start is a conversation.
We can usually tell within an hour whether Orientation is the right first move, whether you should go straight to a Sprint, or whether we’re not the right partner for this one. None of those answers costs you anything.