Pilots with a budget. That holds.
The client sees the fee. You see the hours behind it, and the one that would cross them waits for a decision instead of a retrospective.
Industries · Data and AI consultancies
The pilot is fixed fee. The hours behind it are counted.
An eight-week pilot at $48,000 is 240 hours only you know, and eval reruns take them quietly. Ceed keeps the count and holds the hour that would cross it.
For consultancies of two to fifty people, from the first pilot with a contractor on it.
Bramblewood Mutual · August · pilot, 240 hHeld
246.5 of 240 h
Thu 20 Aug · 6.5 h · Eval harness rebuild and regression rerun after re-chunking · Grace W.
Held for approval. 6.5 h over the budget.
ApproveDecline
$48,000
the fixed-fee pilot
240 h
the hours behind it
$225
the hour past it, per the statement of work
$48
Ceed, this month
Found when the pilot ends. Or found at the hour.
Data cleaning and eval reruns take the budget a day at a time, and the retainer that was sized at two hours a month takes nine. The overrun is found when the pilot is reconciled against the timesheets, after the demo, with the margin gone.
Ceed counts every entry against the pilot’s hours as it is logged, contract engineers included. The hour that would cross 240 waits for the lead, and the change order is written before the rerun, not after the retrospective.
“i set the retainer assuming maybe 2 hours a month... it’s three times that.”
u/Practical_Low29, r/n8n, May 2026.
Held. Not hidden.
The hour that would push a client over budget is saved, marked, and waits for a yes or no. Nothing is billed quietly. Nothing disappears.
- Logged
6.5 h · Bramblewood Mutual · Eval rerun
- Held
Over the 240-hour budget. Waiting for Jae.
- Approved
On the August invoice at $225, under the change order.
One set of hours. Everything follows.
Contract engineers. Same record.
A contract machine-learning engineer’s hours count against the same budget. Their statement is computed from the entries your invoice used, at their rate.
Beside your repo. And your model provider.
Code, evals and the model provider’s bill stay where they are. Ceed is the record of hours and money the invoice is computed from.
Invoice · Bramblewood Mutual · August 2026Computed
Claims-triage pilot, fixed fee · 240 h$48,000.00
Approved hours past the budget · 6.5 h at $225.00$1,462.50
Total$49,462.50
Computed from the statement of work dated 29 Jun 2026. Grace’s statement comes from the same entries.
From the field. In their words.
What AI consultancy founders say in public about pricing pilots, retainers that ran long and usage costs. Linked and dated. Not our words.
Said on X.
AI agencies lose money on retainers because of something I call the monthly proof problem.
… Development has no automatic monthly proof. There’s no clean result that resets every 30 days. If you sell a retainer before a system is live, the client pays month one and sees a half-built thing. Month two, same. They churn, and they’re right to.
… A retainer doesn’t automatically beat a project, it just changes when the cash lands.
Pilot Purgatory: the demos went great, six months passed, and nothing shipped. Not because the tool was bad. Because it never became anybody’s job.
Nobody has figured out how to price AI.
… Everyone is experimenting. No one has converged.
… I think we’re going to end up somewhere in the middle. Some base fee, plus usage on top. Basically how cloud infrastructure already works. But honestly no one knows yet.
Said on YouTube.
Said elsewhere.
- RedditHow do you actually charge clients for n8n upkeep month to month?r/n8n · May 2026 · a retainer sized at two hours that takes nine
- RedditHaving troubles switching clients to retainer paymentr/agency · May 2026 · an ML agency on pilots that never reach production
- ArticleEverything I know about consultingJason Liu · August 2024 · rates, proposals and the point where hourly stops making sense
- ArticleAI isn’t killing consulting. It’s killing time as a proxy for valueMark Wilson · July 2026 · effort compresses, experience does not
- ArticleAI engineers are being deployed as consultants and getting paid $900 an hourFortune · September 2025 · what the hour bills at the top of the market
- ForumAsk HN: how do you bill AI usage inside a fixed project fee?Hacker News · March 2026 · normal usage inside the fee, heavy runs billed separately
Of what you invoice. That is the pricing page.
Invoice $48,000 this month for Bramblewood Mutual and Ceed costs $48. A month you invoice nothing costs nothing. No seats, no tiers, no minimum.
Questions. Answers.
Our pilots are fixed fee with 240 hours behind them. Will Ceed hold hour 241?
Yes. The client sees the fee. The hours are the budget you sized it with, and the entry that would cross 240 is held the moment it is logged, before the rerun runs all week.
Can the model provider’s usage sit next to hours in the client’s budget?
Ceed keeps hours and the money computed from them. Usage you re-bill stays on your model provider’s invoice.
If we move to outcome-based fees, what is the budget?
The hours you are willing to spend to earn the fee. The client sees the outcome and the fee. You see the hours, and the one that crosses them waits.
Can a contract engineer be paid from the same hours at a different rate and currency?
Their statement is computed from the same entries at their rate.
Does 0.1% include pass-through usage we re-bill?
Ceed charges 0.1% of the invoices it computes. Usage you invoice from elsewhere costs nothing.
From the blog: Held. Not hidden. The agreement said 40 hours. The month said 47. Other firms Ceed is for: Software dev shops · IT consulting · Management consulting · all nineteen.