Agentic Services — Pricing
You know your agent needs governance. The question now is what that costs, what you get, and whether it beats building it in-house or hiring a consultancy. These three tiers give you a concrete anchor before the discovery call.
Every engagement starts with a scoping discovery call. Final price depends on your agent’s complexity and authority model. The ranges below are directional anchors — they reflect where most engagements land, not a fixed quote.
Tier 1
Starter Audit
One agent · assessment and risk register · no implementation
Tier 2
Fleet Pilot
One agent · full engagement · discovery through launch-readiness handoff
Tier 3
Full Deployment
3+ agents · fleet-wide controls · governance architecture
Final scope and price are confirmed on the discovery call. If your situation is smaller or more complex than these anchors, say so in the inquiry form and we will scope accordingly. No obligation until we both agree on fit.
If you are weighing these options, the decision usually comes down to three questions: how fast do you need it, how reusable does the output need to be, and what does a production incident actually cost you.
| What you’re comparing | RFE Online Fleet Pilot | Build in-house | Hire a generalist consultancy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to first controls in production | 2–3 weeks from discovery call | 4–12 weeks depending on team familiarity | 6–16 weeks (discovery, scoping, proposal cycles) |
| Governance model based on live fleet evidence | Yes — RFE Online’s 10-agent production fleet | No — builds from theory and first principles | No — typically framework-based, not production-tested |
| Reusable worksheet your team owns | Yes — included in Fleet Pilot and above | Yes — but you build it yourself | Sometimes — often locked behind ongoing retainer |
| Fixed-scope engagement (no scope creep) | Yes — confirmed on discovery call | Depends on internal resourcing and priorities | Rarely — generalist consultancies expand scope to expand billing |
| Addresses both code and transaction failure modes | Yes — both plays available in one engagement | Depends on team expertise in both domains | Usually one or the other; specialists cost more |
| Ongoing retainer required | No — engagement ends at launch-readiness handoff | No — but requires ongoing internal resource | Often — recurring billing is the consultancy model |
The honest case for building in-house: if your engineering team already has production AI governance experience and bandwidth, they can implement this faster than any external engagement. The case for RFE Online: if they don’t, the gap between what they think they know and what a live adversarial production environment reveals is where incidents happen.
The right tier is determined by where you are in the deployment lifecycle and how much authority your agent currently holds.
Starter Audit — $2,500+
You are not ready to invest in full hardening yet — you want a defensible risk register that tells you what the actual blockers are before you scale. The Starter Audit gives you that without committing to implementation work.
Fleet Pilot — $7,500+
Your agent is in production or about to be, and you know a governance gap exists. The Fleet Pilot takes one agent through the full engagement — audit, hardening, controls design — and leaves you with a reusable framework for the rest of the fleet.
Full Deployment — $18,000+
You have three or more agents in production, and agent-to-agent trust boundaries, shared audit infrastructure, and compliance documentation are becoming a real requirement. Full Deployment installs governance at the fleet level.
These are the questions that come up most often in discovery calls. If yours is not here, put it in the inquiry form.
Is the price fixed or does it change after the discovery call?
The ranges above reflect where most engagements land. The discovery call confirms the scope, and the final price is agreed before any work starts. If the scope is narrower than the anchor, the price adjusts down. If it is more complex, that gets surfaced and discussed — no surprises after the fact.
Can I start with a Starter Audit and upgrade to Fleet Pilot later?
Yes. The Starter Audit produces a risk register that becomes the input to a Fleet Pilot if you decide to proceed with implementation. Most buyers who start with a Starter Audit proceed to Fleet Pilot within four to six weeks.
Do you work with agents built on specific platforms (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google)?
The governance patterns we apply are model-agnostic — they address authority model, approval gates, audit trails, and recovery paths, not model selection. We have worked with agents built on Claude, GPT-4, Gemini, and open-weight models. The platform matters less than how authority is scoped and how decisions are recorded.
What if we only have one agent and it is not in production yet?
A Starter Audit before production is the most cost-effective point to engage. Establishing governance architecture before launch is cheaper than retrofitting after the first incident. The risk register you leave with is also the artefact you need to have a credible conversation with stakeholders or a compliance team.
How is this different from what an AI consultancy would deliver?
Most AI consultancies deliver strategy decks and framework recommendations. RFE Online operates a 10-agent production fleet governed by the exact controls we install for clients — every pattern we audit for was pressure-tested on our own infrastructure first. The engagement ends with working controls in your system, not a slide deck about what controls you should build.
The trust-readiness scorecard, hardening vs behaviour testing analysis, and agent fleet hardening case studies all point to the same production question: your agent holds authority it should not hold without governance, and the gap between its current state and a defensible production posture is where incidents happen.
Trust Readiness Scorecard
Five questions, sixty seconds. If your agent scores high on governance urgency, Fleet Pilot is almost certainly the right tier. If you are pre-production and early-stage, Starter Audit gives you the artefact you need without over-committing.
Take the scorecard →Trust Audit Sample
The trust audit sample shows the format and detail level of the risk register and authority model map you receive. Before committing to a tier, reading what the output looks like will tell you whether the depth matches what your team needs.
Read the trust audit page →Leave your email and a few words about your agent or situation. A confirmation email with a Calendly link lands in your inbox the same second — or book directly from the screen that appears after you hit send. No pitch deck, no obligation.
We have your details. Click below to pick a 30-minute slot on Calendly — no pitch, just a direct scoping conversation about your system.
Book discovery call on Calendly →A confirmation email with this link is also on its way to your inbox — use it to book when you’re ready if you’d rather step away first.
A discovery call is where we scope your agent, map the authority it holds, identify the failure modes that concern you most, and confirm which tier — Starter Audit, Fleet Pilot, or Full Deployment — matches your situation and timeline. No pitch deck, no proposal until we know what you actually need.