Trusted by leading enterprises and ambitious innovators
Four ways we price, in order of preference
Ranked from our most preferred model (#01 Business Outcomes) to our least preferred (#04 Time & Materials).
| Order of Preference | How You Pay | Who Carries Delivery Risk | Engineer Speed Incentive | Self-Serve Tool |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #01 Business Outcomes | 20% share of verified 12m savings or GE4CX margin (0% in Yr 2+) | 100% Aviato | Faster go-live & deeper accuracy = larger shared pool | Outcome Calculator → |
| #02 Delivery Units (DU) | Fixed A$10,500 per unit of work | 100% Aviato | Engineer bonus paid directly for delivering ahead of schedule/budget | DU Calculator → |
| #03 Fixed Scope | Milestone payments against a single turnkey Statement of Work | Aviato (within SOW) | Milestone completion & contractual SLA guarantees | Cost Guarantees → |
| #04 Time & Materials | Daily or hourly rate card for time spent | 100% Customer | None — supplier bills more when work takes longer | Advisory Only → |
Transparent trade-offs before you sign
Every commercial structure has strengths and trade-offs. Here is why we prefer Outcomes and Delivery Units — and where Fixed Scope or T&M still fit.
Business Outcomes & Value-Share
We take a 20% value share of verified 12-month cost savings or GE4CX e-commerce upsell profit — and 0% from Year 2 onward.
When deploying AI agents to deflect call-centre escalations, resolve support tickets, automate back-office straight-through processing, or lift e-commerce conversion with Gemini Enterprise for CX (GE4CX), we prefer to tie our fee directly to the measurable delta we create. We lock your 90-day baseline in presales, share in verified savings or incremental gross profit for 12 months only, and hand over 100% of the ongoing value on Day 366.
Pros (Why Customers Choose It)
- + Self-funding out of verified P&L savings or incremental gross margin — impossible to pay for "AI shelfware"
- + You keep 80% of every dollar saved in Year 1 (more with early buyout or case study credits) and 100% from Year 2 onward
- + Strict 12-month sunset: 100% of Year 2, Year 3, and future savings plus all source code belong to you forever
- + $20,000 AUD base fee to initiate is non-refundable, and 100% credited against our payout for success
Cons & Trade-Offs
- − Requires historical baseline telemetry (CCaaS, ITSM, ERP, or BigQuery) or a live 5–10% e-commerce holdout cohort to verify the delta
- − Requires at least $40,000 AUD in estimated Year-1 outcome fees to underwrite upfront production engineering
- − Not suited to greenfield infrastructure builds or internal salaried productivity tools where no external vendor/unit cost is being reduced
Delivery Units (DU)
Bounded increments of working software at a fixed price per accepted unit — with engineer compensation tied directly to beating schedule and budget.
For Google Cloud landing zones, BigQuery data platforms, security posture engineering, and custom AI agents where you want deterministic capital budgeting, we sell work in Delivery Units ($10,500 AUD per DU). Each unit has written acceptance criteria agreed in presales before you commit. You only pay for units you formally accept — and we directly tie our engineers’ compensation to delivering accepted units ahead of budget and schedule.
Pros (Why Customers Choose It)
- + Fixed price per unit of work — no hourly rate card to negotiate and no timesheets to police
- + You only pay for units you accept; if a unit misses written acceptance criteria, we fix it at our cost before your balance draws down
- + Engineer compensation is tied directly to delivering ahead of schedule and budget, rewarding speed and quality rather than hours burned
- + Scope change is simple arithmetic: a new requirement is a known number of units at a published price, plus 10% off when paying upfront
Cons & Trade-Offs
- − Requires upfront presales scoping with our Principal Architects to decompose your project into bounded units with clear acceptance criteria
- − Designed for defined software and infrastructure outcomes rather than open-ended staff augmentation
Fixed-Scope Turnkey & Cost-Guaranteed Migrations
A single contracted price, cutover date, and contractual SLA for end-to-end cloud migrations or rapid MVPs.
When your board or procurement team requires a single turnkey Statement of Work (SOW) for a multi-wave migration or a fixed-envelope build, we contract on fixed milestones — including our contractual 20% Cost-Guarantee migrations from AWS and Snowflake (backed by a $50,000 AUD cash SLA) and our $16k Rapid MVP programme.
Pros (Why Customers Choose It)
- + Single lump-sum budget sign-off for procurement and board investment committees
- + Eligible for our contractual 20% run-rate reduction guarantee (or Aviato pays $50,000 AUD cash) and Google Cloud partner co-funding
- + Zero variation risk across the agreed statement of work
Cons & Trade-Offs
- − Less modular mid-flight than Delivery Units — changing requirements outside the master SOW requires a formal variation order
- − Takes longer in upfront legal and architecture discovery to lock the complete end-to-end specification before kickoff
Time & Materials (T&M)
Daily or hourly rate card for embedded advisory, discovery, or fractional Principal Architect support.
We are candid about why T&M sits last on our list: billing by the hour means the supplier makes more money when the work takes longer. That is a broken incentive for software delivery. We only use T&M when requirements are genuinely unknowable upfront — such as executive architecture advisory, incident response, or short discovery engagements — and we transition into Business Outcomes or Delivery Units as soon as the target outcomes are clear.
Pros (Why Customers Choose It)
- + Zero upfront scoping delay — a Principal Architect can start tomorrow on unstructured or rapidly shifting priorities
- + Complete day-to-day flexibility to redirect focus without rewriting acceptance criteria
Cons & Trade-Offs
- − Misaligned commercial incentives: hourly billing rewards slowness and penalizes engineering efficiency
- − 100% of schedule, productivity, and delivery risk sits on the customer’s balance sheet
- − Requires ongoing timesheet auditing, burn-rate tracking, and procurement extensions
We tie engineer compensation directly to delivering ahead of budget and schedule
In traditional consultancies, engineers are paid a flat salary regardless of whether a deliverable takes two weeks or two months — and the consultancy makes higher margin when the team drags its feet. Even in standard fixed-price agencies, Parkinson’s Law takes over: work expands to fill the allotted timeline because engineers have zero personal upside for finishing early.
At Aviato, we re-engineered internal compensation around Delivery Units. Every unit has a fixed budget (A$10,500) and written acceptance criteria agreed with you before work begins. When our engineers use agentic engineering, reusable Terraform modules, and deep Google Cloud expertise to deliver an accepted unit ahead of schedule and under budget, they receive a direct financial bonus from the efficiency gain.
Bonuses only trigger upon your formal acceptance
An engineer cannot earn an early-delivery bonus by rushing out half-baked code. Every unit is gated by a Principal Architect review and must pass the written acceptance criteria you agreed to in presales. If it fails acceptance, we fix it at our cost.
Engineers invest in automation instead of manual toil
Because beating the schedule directly increases their take-home pay, our engineers aggressively build automated test harnesses, Terraform factories, and ADK agent templates — meaning your project ships weeks ahead of expectation.
You never pay for our learning curve
If a unit turns out harder than we estimated, we absorb the overrun. If our engineers solve it in half the time, they get rewarded and you get production software early at the exact price you approved.
Choosing the right pricing structure
Prices across the site are set in AUD, with fixed conversions as at 24 October 2026.
Why do you rank Business Outcomes and Delivery Units ahead of Time & Materials?
Because we use AI and automation internally to build faster than traditional consultancies. Under Time & Materials, if our engineers use agentic tooling and reusable Terraform modules to finish a 10-week project in 3 weeks, we get paid 70% less for doing a better job. Under Business Outcomes (/outcomes/) and Delivery Units (/du/), shipping faster and building higher-performing systems rewards both your business and our engineering team.
How does tying engineer compensation to Delivery Units benefit the customer?
In a traditional consultancy, salaried engineers get paid the same whether a milestone takes two weeks or two months — so work naturally expands to fill the schedule. At Aviato, every Delivery Unit has a fixed budget and written acceptance criteria, and our engineers earn direct performance bonuses when they deliver accepted units ahead of budget and ahead of schedule. Because the bonus only triggers after our Principal Architect reviews the work and you formally accept the unit against written criteria, engineers can never cut corners — they only win by delivering clean, defect-free engineering ahead of expectation.
How do I choose between Business Outcomes (/outcomes/) and Delivery Units (/du/)?
Ask one question: is the project reducing an existing, measurable operational cost (or lifting e-commerce conversion) with at least $40,000 AUD in Year-1 fee share? If yes, use Business Outcomes (/outcomes/) so the project self-funds out of verified savings. If you are building foundational cloud infrastructure, migrating databases, deploying security controls, or building internal tools for salaried teams, use Delivery Units (/du/) for a fixed price per unit of work.
Who pays for Google Cloud consumption across these models?
You always pay Google Cloud and third-party software vendors directly on your own billing account at cost. We never resell cloud consumption with a hidden markup. Where eligible, as a Google Cloud Premier Partner we secure Google migration and POC funding credits to offset your upfront engineering or consumption costs.