The data consultancy honest enough to refuse to sell you AI

If you're here because you already know who we are, whether you're an executive or employee, hit the button below. Our managing director will personally contact you.

If not, read on. We'll put an enquiry form at the bottom of this page too.

We’re a very opinionated data and software consultancy that does things very differently, and that starts with this website — yes, we're the mythical consultancy with a website that actually explains things about us.

What's Different About Us?

It's very simple and unique, but it shouldn't be.

We don't think it's acceptable for software projects to run late or to cut corners.

A formative moment in our consultancy was realizing that many people have never seen a software project unambiguously work. They're always late, or skipped testing, or went over budget, or something. We don't abide by that. We deliver what we promise on time. We do lots of concrete things to help keep to this promise — more than we can talk about here — but here are a few examples.

We won't sell you AI

I know, crazy, right? Half of our team has advanced degrees in machine learning and other AI-affiliated fields, but we don't sell that. Starting with a popular solution before knowing what your problem is would be fundamentally dishonest. We don't do that sort of thing here. We're selling engineers with great social skills, a love of software engineering, and a real care for clients.

We're so confident that we favour fixed-price guarantees with refunds

Lots of our competitors love to convince people to kick off projects that span years, then continually extend the bill month-by-month as they almost deliver what they promised. Their business model is the sunk-cost fallacy. This is actually a huge amount of our work: cleaning up the messes that someone else left behind.

Our preferred model of work, especially in the early days when we're building up trust, is to run a series of fixed-price engagements. This means that we'll find something that is valuable for you even if no additional work ever takes place, and we'll deliver that very quickly, very efficiently, and to a standard that makes many of our competitors look terrible, a decision which is only partially spite-driven. Your risk is always small, and you never spend money without a win.

Despite this, at the time of writing, we have never run late on a project and we have never lost business to another consultancy.

We don't outsource or bait-and-switch labour

Hermit Tech only has directors with equal shares in the business. When we scope out your problems and sell you work, one of our directors will personally do the programming. One of us is writing the copy that you are reading right now. You will never, ever pay top-dollar only to get the cheapest labour a consultancy could dig up. You will always have a direct line to someone that is familiar with your business, your code, your people, and the details of the engagement.

Your engineers will love us

If you've already got engineers on staff, they will be thrilled to have us on board. Our executive director is very popular with the international software community. We're quite flexible with how we work, but our ideal engagement involves sitting down with your engineers every single day and working alongside them. We've got some ways of working that we're quite proud of, and your engineers have got the domain knowledge. They'll appreciate having consultants that can actually program at a very high level, and we'll appreciate not wasting weeks of billable time learning about your business the hard way. We hit the ground running.

Everyone here runs a business

You know how a lot of software people don't know much about business (sorry, we still love you), and this can make aligning on value-delivery hard? Everyone at Hermit runs a business. We're directors in the "managing director" sense of the word. We write code, but we also deal with cash flow, sales, and legal risk. Imagine how nice it'll be to work with someone that can talk to you about all of that and actually handle the implementation for you.