1. One-off FORTs
Fixed scope and an agreed delivery fee, typically in a two-week cycle. Each FORT has its own acceptance criteria and documented handover; continuing work is a separate choice.
Reserved Capability
Your fractional digital department, on call.
Reserved Capability is ongoing access to senior engineering without building a permanent digital team: defined outcomes delivered in focused FORT cycles, then maintained for the long term — scaled up or down as your roadmap demands.
Three ways to engage
- One-off FORTs — fixed scope, fixed price, two-week cadence
- Garden Care — optional monthly care after a FORT
- Reserved Capability — a separate, larger agreement for continuing delivery
Agreed outcomesTransparent feesDocumented handover
The buying model
Start narrow. Stay only if it earns its place.
Start with a paid Technical Review, agree a defined improvement as a FORT, then decide whether optional monthly Garden Care fits your needs. Reserved Capability is a different, larger agreement, not the default next step.
2. Garden Care
Optional monthly care that keeps what a FORT delivered healthy: scheduled checks, routine updates and bounded improvements.
3. Reserved Capability
A separate, larger commitment for continuing roadmap delivery — reserved senior capacity across an agreed plan.
Engagement level 1
One-off FORTs: fixed scope, fixed price.
A FORT is one focused improvement with an agreed price before work starts. The two-week window is a cadence — not two full-time weeks from five full-time specialists. Roles can be combined or fractional, matched to the scope. Work that cannot fit safely in one cycle is quoted as multiple FORTs with distinct milestones.
| FORT | What it covers | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Focused FORT | One bounded improvement to an existing system. | £1,750 |
| Core FORT | One complete workflow with agreed integrations and a clean handover. | £3,250 |
| Advanced FORT | Specialist or multi-system scope, individually assessed. | From £5,500 |
Fixed for a published standard scope. Anything broader is a typical scoped engagement — we agree a fixed written quote before work starts.
Prices exclude taxes and third-party charges. South African and UK prices are separate regional proposals, not currency conversions. Elsewhere, including the US, pricing is quoted per region on request.
Every FORT carries a 30-day correction window for reproducible defects against the agreed acceptance criteria. New requirements and third-party changes are separate.
Engagement level 2
Garden Care: keep it working, monthly.
After a FORT, your system moves into a care routine we call PRUNE — Performance checks, Reports, Updates, Nurture, Enhancements. PRUNE describes the routine; the tier decides how much of it is included. Care is optional and paid monthly in advance: an initial three-month term, then 30 days' cancellation notice.
Garden Care
£350 / month · United Kingdom
3 hours/month internal labour allowance
- One agreed application or workflow service boundary
- Scheduled health checks
- Routine compatible patches
- Monthly status report
- One minor configuration or content adjustment, up to 30 minutes
Garden Growth
£750 / month · United Kingdom
6 hours/month internal labour allowance
- Everything in Garden Care, plus ONE defined growth lane:
- SEO — one property, a monthly performance report and up to two bounded on-page improvements (content production separately scoped)
- Paid search — one platform, up to two existing campaigns, an agreed spend ceiling and monthly reporting. You fund the advertising directly
Garden Operations
From £1,500 / month · United Kingdom
12 hours/month internal labour allowance
- Individually scoped asset and service register
- More frequent reviews
- Reserved small improvements
Prices exclude taxes and third-party charges. South African and UK prices are separate regional proposals, not currency conversions. Elsewhere, including the US, pricing is quoted per region on request.
What “on call” means here
- Support window: weekdays 09:00–17:00 in your contracted timezone.
- We acknowledge requests within one business day.
- That is an acknowledgement, not a resolution guarantee.
- This is not a 24/7 incident service.
- Automated monitoring may run continuously — it does not imply round-the-clock human response.
Care boundaries
- New features are scoped as FORTs, not absorbed into care hours.
- No unlimited support or unlimited improvements.
- Unused allowance does not roll over automatically.
- Internal hours are workload controls, not client deliverables.
- We tell you before usage reaches its limit and agree a top-up or pause — we don't silently interrupt critical systems.
Engagement level 3
Reserved Capability: the larger commitment, kept separate.
Reserved Capability is a distinct agreement for continuing roadmap delivery — reserved senior capacity working an agreed plan across multiple delivery cycles. A Garden Care subscription does not buy a full fractional digital department, and care is not a stepping stone you fall through into a retainer. Clients reach Reserved Capability deliberately, after delivered FORTs have proven the working relationship.
It is scoped individually: its own capacity, cadence, governance and terms. The evidence trail below — the roles, the phalanx, the traceability chain — is the same delivery substance you would be reserving. What changes is the commitment, not the method.
Programme formations
Legionnaire. Phalanx. Musk’Teer.
MARCH (six months), BASTION (twelve months) and CITADEL (five years) are larger, separately scoped programme horizons. Choose one senior embedded Legionnaire, a multidisciplinary Phalanx, or the AI-forward Musk’Teer for private AI, local inference, agents and automation. Every formation has named capacity and service boundaries; none means unlimited people or work.
Explore the programme blueprint and configurator · Musk’Teer: “Your data stays grounded. Your ambition doesn’t.”
Your technology budget
Fixed and variable costs, shown separately.
We show agreed Cooper Agile fees separately from variable usage and optional services, so you can see which costs are fixed and which need an allowance.
Fixed
- Your monthly Garden Care fee, if you take it.
- Scheduled FORT instalments for agreed, in-flight work.
Variable or optional
- Named third-party subscriptions — hosting, platforms, AI usage.
- Capped or estimated usage, with a notification before a limit is reached.
- Applicable taxes and third-party charges, shown near the price, not buried in a footer.
Wherever possible your vendor accounts stay in your name — you own the subscription, the data and the relationship. If we ever resell a service, we show the billing basis, the exposure and the authorisation ceiling first.
How delivery runs
The FORT delivery cycle.
Frame — we pin down the business intent, scope, and what 'done' looks like with evidence.
Orchestrate — we assemble the specialist capability and stand up the tools, agents, and environments.
Realise — the FORT delivers in short loops, with traceability from intent to working software.
Transfer — capability, documentation, and evidence move to your team. Nothing is locked in.
How work stays accountable
Traceable from intent to outcome.
Every FORT runs on the same governance chain, in plain language — agreed acceptance criteria, appropriate human review, testing, traceable decisions and a clear handover.
01
Intent — the business outcome, stated plainly.
02
Behaviour — BDD specifications as the behavioural contract.
03
Work — delivery coordinated by specialised Cooper roles.
04
Evidence — production traceability at every step.
05
Outcome — measurable results, not activity reports.
06
Learning — each FORT feeds the next cycle.
For Agile-literate teams
FORT, translated.
If your organisation runs Scrum or Kanban, you already know the outer shape of a FORT. The name is deliberate — a FORT is a fortnight, one two-week cycle, the length of a classic sprint. The difference is what happens inside it.
You know: Sprint
In a FORT: The FORT itself — a fixed fortnight-long cycle: plan, deliver, review, improve.
You know: Sprint planning + definition of done
In a FORT: Frame — the problem, baseline, constraints and acceptance criteria, agreed before work starts.
You know: Backlog refinement + team assembly
In a FORT: Orchestrate — the people, systems and tools assembled for this specific outcome.
You know: The sprint, day to day
In a FORT: Realise — build, integrate and test the agreed capability, with evidence accumulating as work lands.
You know: Review, retrospective, handover
In a FORT: Transfer — deploy appropriately, document, train, and leave your team with usable capability.
You know: Scrum Master
In a FORT: The Delivery Coordinator — runs the cycle, guards the evidence trail and keeps decisions traceable.
FORTs work inside your existing ceremonies, not instead of them — and we don't claim Scrum certifications we don't hold. The method borrows the cadence every Agile team recognises and adds the one thing sprints often lose: traceability from business intent to handed-over outcome.
The people we embed
The phalanx: Foot Soldiers in formation.
Our name for the engineers who arrive when a FORT needs serious horsepower is the Foot Soldier — a senior operator who can be dropped into an unfamiliar stack and be productive in days. When a FORT needs more than one, they fight in formation: interlocked like shields, bound tight like a scrum. The phalanx. It forms during Orchestrate, fights through Realise, and disbands cleanly at Transfer.
High-scale, event-driven production systems
Message queues and pub/sub (RabbitMQ, Redis), task workers (Celery), event-driven integrations, and the failure modes that come with them — retries, dead letters, backpressure.
Microservices and monoliths, judged on merit
Fluent across service topologies and honest about when each is right. No rebuild ideology: the proportionate architecture wins.
Polyglot and platform-agnostic
Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, PHP, and the clouds and containers they run on. Any environment, existing conventions respected, no ramp-up drama.
Foot Soldiers can lead a FORT, reinforce your existing team, or run quietly in the background under a Technical Oversight retainer. The common thread: senior people who fit in without needing to be carried. Read the companion piece: Queues, events and microservices in plain language.
Specialised roles
The people inside a FORT.
Specialised Cooper roles coordinate delivery — with replaceable AI and model infrastructure underneath, formal escalation paths, and evidence at every step.
Delivery Coordinator
Runs the FORT cycle end to end and keeps evidence flowing.
Capability Lead
Owns the capability mix and scales specialists up or down.
Specialist Engineer
Hands-on delivery across web, applications, and integrations.
Automation Engineer
Builds workflow and agentic automations inside delivery.
Quality & Evidence Lead
Guards the behavioural contract and outcome traceability.
Then decide
After the FORT, the choice is yours.
Take the handover and run it yourself, add Garden Care for a bounded monthly routine, or — when the roadmap justifies it — talk to us about Reserved Capability. Each step is optional and separately agreed.
Next step
Bring us the business problem.
Start with a free fit check. A paid Technical Review then maps one agreed system or workflow, its risks, dependencies and improvement options. You approve the scope and fee before it starts.