Custom AI development for small businesses.
One automation that removes a real cost, built for a fixed price and live in 4–8 weeks. No enterprise minimums, no retainers, no rented SaaS stack. You own the code.
Mark Austen, Founder — replies within 24 hours
What we build for small businesses
The highest-ROI builds for 10–50 person teams. Most start with one workflow and grow from there.
Customer support AI
A bot on your site or WhatsApp that answers the questions your team types out ten times a day, and hands off to a human when it matters.
Admin automation
Invoice processing, document filing, data entry between the systems that don't talk to each other. The hours that quietly eat your week.
Reconciliation & bookkeeping AI
Bank statements matched to invoices automatically, anomalies flagged, month-end sped up. Connected to your accounting stack.
Lead follow-up agent
Every enquiry answered in seconds, qualified, and chased on a schedule. Small teams lose the most leads to slow follow-up.
Scheduling & intake
Bookings, intake forms, reminders and rescheduling handled end to end, without a receptionist doing calendar tetris.
Reports that write themselves
The weekly numbers pulled from your tools and summarised into one email or dashboard, on schedule, every time.
Why custom beats stacking SaaS subscriptions
Most small businesses solve each problem with another $50–300/month tool. Here's where one custom build takes over.
Fixed price, not a retainer
One written quote before we start. No agency retainer, no per-seat pricing that grows with your team. Most small-business builds land between £4K and £20K.
Owned, not rented
The code lives in your GitHub from day one and runs on infrastructure you control. Cancel nothing, migrate nothing, lose nothing.
Built around your tools
Your accounting package, your calendar, your inbox, your CRM. Custom AI wraps what you already use instead of forcing a migration.
Start with one workflow
You don't need an AI strategy. You need the one automation with the clearest ROI, live in weeks. Everything else can plug into the same foundation later.
Founder-led
You talk to the developer who writes the code. No account managers, no handovers, weekly Friday demos so you always see progress.
A worked example
A power-generation company's finance team was doing bank reconciliation by hand, every day.
We built a reconciliation system connected to their ERP and bank feeds. In their words: "AI Makers built our bank reconciliation system in 3 weeks. It replaced hours of manual data entry every day." That's the small-business pattern — one painful, repetitive workflow, automated properly, paying for itself in months.
Want a number first?
Use the cost estimator or check the typical timeline before booking a call.
small businesses FAQ
Is custom AI affordable for a small business?+
Yes, if you scope it right. A focused build (one workflow, a few integrations) typically lands between £4K and £20K fixed — comparable to a year or two of the SaaS subscriptions it replaces, except you own it. Use the estimator at /custom-ai/cost/ for a ballpark.
We don't have an IT team. Does that matter?+
No. We host it (or set it up on a simple cloud account you own), maintain it under a month-to-month arrangement, and hand over documentation a future developer can pick up. No in-house engineers required.
How fast can we be live?+
A single workflow: 3–6 weeks. Something touching several systems: 6–10 weeks. You see a working demo every Friday from week one.
What if we grow?+
That's the point of owning it. The same foundation takes more workflows, more users and more integrations without re-platforming — and each addition is cheaper than the first because the plumbing exists.
What should we automate first?+
The task someone does every day that follows the same rules every time. Reconciliation, lead follow-up, intake, reporting. On the free discovery call we'll tell you straight which one has the clearest ROI — and if none does, we'll say that too.
Ready to remove a real cost?
Free 30-minute discovery call. Tell us the task that eats your team's week and we'll come back with a written fixed-price quote within a few days.