A written review of what you already have.
You already run something. Somebody built it, and either they have gone or nobody has looked at it since. We look at it and write down what we would do about it — what breaks, what it decides without asking anyone, what leaves your business, and what it would cost to put right.
The document is yours to keep whoever ends up building it, including nobody. If the honest answer is that you do not need any of this, the document says that.
$1,350
Fixed. Paid before we start, which is also when the document becomes yours. No calls — everything in writing.
You should not have to buy a document to find out what it looks like.
So here is one, in full, free to read. It is the format, the depth and the tone of the thing you would receive.
Written review of an existing automation
The system in it is a small customer-email automation that we wrote ourselves and filled with invented customer records, so that the checks had something real to run against. No company in it is a client and nothing in it has been relied on by anybody. Because we built that system, we are not independent of it, and the document says so in its own words rather than leaving you to notice.
It reports what the checks actually returned, including one place where a check of ours reported something untrue and had to be corrected before the document was written. That is in there too.
Open the specimenThe eight things we look at
The same eight every time, in this order. They came out of building systems, not out of reading about them — several of them exist because we have watched that exact failure in work of our own.
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What it is supposed to do, against what it does.
We put real messages through it and read what comes back out. Not the diagram, not the description — the thing running.
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What happens when it breaks.
We make a piece of it fail on purpose and watch where the work goes. A dropped record that nobody is told about is the most expensive kind.
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What it decides on its own.
Every point where the system finishes something without a person seeing it, and what the largest one of those is worth.
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What leaves your business, and who receives it.
The exact fields in the exact request, named one by one. Most systems send the whole record because sending the whole record is easier than choosing.
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What it costs to run, and what happens if the volume doubles.
Paid calls per event, and whether anything at all stops the number climbing on a bad week.
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What you would still own if we disappeared.
Where the rules actually live, whether they are written down anywhere else, and whether the whole thing can be handed to somebody new.
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What we would refuse to touch, and why.
Written down as plainly as the recommendations, because the things we will not do tell you more about us than the things we will.
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What we would do, in what order, with prices.
Ordered so that everything stopping money moving wrongly comes before anything that improves the answers.
What a review will not do
Worth reading before you pay for one, because these are the four things people most often expect and do not get.
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We do not score how ready you are.
There is no questionnaire here, no maturity score, no number out of ten, and nothing about whether you are ready for anything. Those are answered by filling in a form about a system nobody has opened. We open yours. Every finding in the document comes from putting real messages through the thing you actually run and watching what it does — including making it fail on purpose. A score is an opinion about the future; this is a record of what already happened.
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We do not read your customer records.
This looks at a system that runs — we put real messages through it and force a failure to see what it does. On the specimen that is how we found a refund released to somebody who did not own the order. If your problem is the records themselves — duplicates, gaps, contacts that cannot be right — that is a different job that reads data rather than running it, and it starts at $390.
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We do not fix anything during a review.
The review changes no code. If it changed code it would be a build, and you would be paying to have a system altered by somebody who has not yet agreed what alteration is wanted.
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We do not review our own work.
If we built it, looking at it again is a different piece of work with a different name, and it gets described and charged differently.
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We do not quote a monthly running cost from a review alone.
The model, the volume and the provider’s price list are all things you can change. A figure quoted without those is decoration.
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We do not tell you it is fine to get the build.
If the honest answer is that you do not need any of this, the document says that, and the document still costs $1,350.
What you end up holding
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The document itself, and it is yours.
Not a licence to read it, not a portal login. A file. Send it to another firm and ask them to quote against it if you like — that is a reasonable thing to do with it and we would rather you did that than nothing.
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Everything we ran, described well enough to run again.
The messages we put through, the failure we forced, and what each one returned. A finding you cannot reproduce is an opinion wearing a number.
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The list of what we did not look at.
Named plainly, so nothing in the document reads as covering more than it does.
The guarantee, worded as the terms word it
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A full refund inside seven days if it misses the scope.
We agree in writing what the review will cover before anything starts. If what arrives does not cover it, email us within seven days of delivery and the payment comes back. That is the same clause in our terms, not a friendlier version of it for a sales page.
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We do not promise a date, because our terms do not carry one.
The two-week guarantee elsewhere on this site covers builds. For a review we agree a date with you in the scope, and we would rather say that than publish a number the contract does not stand behind.
Not sure whether a review is what you need first?
Write to us and describe the problem in your own words — no form, no call. We will tell you which one we would pick, what is good and bad about that choice, where it would be the wrong buy, and what it costs. If the honest answer is that you do not need any of it, we will say that instead.
If you want one
Email us and say what you run and roughly what it does. We will tell you what a review of it would cover, in writing, before you pay anything. We reply within one business day.