Clear starting points
Many firms in this space hide pricing so the number arrives after you are invested in the conversation. I would rather you decide whether this is affordable before either of us spends an hour on a call. These are real starting points; the audit produces the actual number.
Growth system audit
For any founder who wants to know which checkpoint is broken before spending on the wrong one.
Credited in full against a build
Request the auditSystem build
For a business ready to build or rebuild the machine the audit mapped.
Growth Systems Care
For a business with the machine in place that wants it monitored and improved.
What isn’t included. Third-party software subscriptions, paid media budget, photography, and video production are quoted separately or bought directly by you at cost. I do not mark up other people’s invoices, and I hold no reseller relationships that would give me a reason to recommend one tool over another.
Variables
A build touching fewer layers generally costs less than one spanning most of the system. The audit establishes which changes are worth doing.
Keeping a CRM or a site that is adequate is often cheaper than replacing it, and the proposal will say so where it applies.
Tools with a documented API are generally easier to integrate. Legacy software without one, or a platform whose terms restrict integration, can add time and risk.
A common cause of a slower project is waiting on content, approvals, and subject-matter answers rather than engineering.
One approver is fast. A committee is not, and the timeline should say so honestly at the start.
You request an audit and I confirm scope and next steps within two business days. If it is not a fit, I say so then rather than after you have paid. The audit is invoiced before the work starts and delivered within five business days of having what I need.
The audit ends with a costed plan. If you go on to a build, the audit fee is credited in full against it. If you do not, you keep the plan and can execute it with anyone, including an internal team. The plan is designed to stand on its own rather than depend on hiring Ariadne for the build.
Saying this plainly avoids calls that were never likely to go anywhere.
Straight answers
Anything else, put it in the audit form and I will answer directly.
support@ariadne.fyiBecause delivering the review properly takes real hours. Charging for it makes room for a thorough, usable deliverable instead of disguising a sales call as free advice. If you proceed to a build, the full $950 audit fee is applied as a credit on the build invoice.
Not honestly. A quote before a diagnosis is a guess wearing a confident tone, and it is how projects end up scoped around the thing the client happened to be thinking about rather than the thing costing them money. If you already have a recent audit from someone else, send it and we can work from that.
Builds are milestone-based, so payment is spread across the project rather than taken up front. The specific schedule is in the proposal. The audit is a single payment before the work starts.
Scope changes get quoted as scope changes, in writing, before they happen. Absorbing them silently is how fixed-price work turns into an argument, and how the parts nobody is watching quietly get worse.
No. Every build includes documentation intended to let another capable engineer maintain it. A business with an internal owner may choose to run the system itself; the care plan is for teams that want Ariadne to keep owning monitoring and continued improvement.
Yes. Delivery is remote and most of the work is jurisdiction-neutral. Where it is not — consent rules for commercial email, privacy obligations, professional advertising standards — the system gets built to your jurisdiction rather than to mine.
Your practical starting point
A build quote before an audit is a guess with a confident tone. The audit costs $950, takes five business days, and is credited in full if you go on to build.