Five services. One set of terms — with one honest exception.
Four of these are sold the same way: a fixed price for an agreed outcome, in stages of six weeks or less, each ending in working software you own. The exception is the fractional CTO arrangement: ongoing judgement can't be priced as an outcome, so it's a simple monthly retainer you can end at a month's notice. Everything else on this page, the quote is the quote.
Every engagement is scoped, led and delivered end to end by the same accountable expert. No handoffs, no layers, no account team. The first conversation is free, and so is our first read of your problem. The records cited below were earned by our founder across 25+ years in UK government technology. The full stories are on the Experience page.
Legacy modernisation
The business-critical system everyone's afraid to touch: ageing, half-documented, carrying risk nobody wants to own. Every plan to replace it has died at "too risky".
The engagement starts small on purpose. First, a fixed-price proof of concept: a modernised slice of your actual system, running side by side with the legacy platform on the same data, within weeks. If it doesn't convince you, you stop there and keep it. If it does, functionality moves across in staged slices, with the old system as the safety net until the day it isn't needed. Target platform: modern .NET, Blazor and Azure, aligned to the GOV.UK/GDS Service Standard where it applies.
- 01 · Prove
Proof before promise
A working demonstration on your actual system within weeks, not a slide deck of projected benefits.
- 02 · Run side by side
Old and new together
Both systems serve real users from day one: no cutover weekend, no leap of faith.
- 03 · Replace & accelerate
Incremental, AI-assisted delivery
Functionality moves across in deliverable slices, with guardrailed AI agents making the legacy archaeology dramatically faster.
This method has done it before: seven programmes over four years, £7m+ of modernisation delivery. All within budget, with no downtime and no significant defects.
Greenfield applications
The new system that has to be right first time — serious money on the line, and no appetite for discovering in production that the brief was wrong.
A new line-of-business system, designed and built to last. The engagement moves from the budget-holder's boardroom, to a wireframe you can argue with, to fixed-price build stages of six weeks or less. Working screens in front of you every couple of weeks, on boring, durable .NET and Azure. The person who frames the problem writes the code, so what gets built is the system the business actually needs, not the one the brief described.
- 01 · Frame
The problem, not the brief
We start in the budget-holder's language and pin down what the system has to change about the business, before any technology is chosen.
- 02 · Shape
A wireframe you can argue with
Screens on a whiteboard are the cheapest place to discover the brief was wrong, and the fastest way to get everyone seeing the same system.
- 03 · Build
Built for the decade, not the demo
The person who framed it writes it. Boring, durable .NET and Azure — documented, tested, and yours from day one.
Our founder's longest-lived build — a document imaging system that replaced a third-party product — is still in production 15+ years on, with no significant defects, saving around £150k a year.
Agentic AI delivery
AI promises everywhere, value nowhere: pilots that stall, tools bought but not adopted, and pressure from the board to show something real.
We'll be direct: the gains are real, but they are not automatic. An AI agent pointed at a codebase without structure will hallucinate confidently and waste your team's time. The same agent, embedded in a disciplined workflow, is a different machine. We stand that workflow up inside your team: guardrails, Git safety nets, reviewable commits, and the delivery patterns that make AI output trustworthy enough to act on. And we measure the gain against your own delivery baseline, not a vendor's benchmark.
- 01 · Baseline
Measure before magic
We start from your real backlog and your current pace, so the uplift is measured against your own numbers, not a benchmark from someone selling tools.
- 02 · Guardrail
Structure before scale
Context, patterns, Git safety nets and review gates that make agent output verifiable. The guardrails are the product.
- 03 · Embed
Your team, more capable
Your engineers direct and verify the agents, and keep the capability when we leave. Success is not being needed.
Running structured human-and-AI delivery on a live government programme, this model lifted raw productivity around 40%, with quality improving, not eroding.
Software architecture & delivery
The problem nobody can quite pin down: everyone agrees something has to change, but the shape of the answer keeps shifting, and serious money is waiting on a design someone will commit to.
We start on your side of the divide and hold one vision from boardroom to production code. That means domain-driven design and message-driven architecture where they earn their keep, and the unglamorous groundwork done early: authentication, CI/CD pipelines, hosting design. Because when the opportunity arrives, "give me six months to set up" is the same as "no".
- 01 · Model
Boundaries where the business divides
Domain-driven design, so the seams in the software fall where the seams in the organisation already are, not where the database happened to.
- 02 · Decouple
Message-driven by default
Components that can fail, scale and be replaced one at a time. Loose coupling is what keeps tomorrow's change from costing what today's did.
- 03 · Groundwork
Pipelines before pressure
Authentication, CI/CD and hosting design laid down early, so when the opportunity arrives, the answer isn't "give me six months to set up".
Lead design on a ~£30m hybrid-cloud transformation that modernised 30+ legacy applications to Azure and AWS PaaS, and scored a perfect client satisfaction rating of 10.
Fractional CTO & delivery rescue
Senior technical leadership, sized to what you need. Sometimes that's steady — a part-time CTO who owns the roadmap. Sometimes it's urgent — a delivery that's lost its way and has to ship.
Leadership without the hire
Technology roadmaps that bridge what's possible and what's affordable, team building and mentoring, and honest counsel for budget-holders making high-stakes decisions. A retained, part-time arrangement: senior judgement on tap, without the salary.
When the delivery is slipping
Budget half-spent, nothing shipped. We take technical leadership, rebuild the vision with the team you already have, and get working screens in front of you in weeks, then hand it back stronger than we found it.
A £750k regulatory programme on course to fail was driven to delivery by financial year-end. A £5m+, four-application modernisation shipped on time and in budget, with zero defects beyond cosmetic. The team of 10 was recruited and built for it.
One accountable expert — and the specialists he trusts.
Every engagement is scoped, led and answered for by our principal, and that never changes with size. When a programme needs more hands, we bring in engineers we've delivered with before, the way a good builder brings in trades he trusts. What we never add is layers.
Accountability never fragments
The person who scoped your engagement leads it and answers for it, whatever its size. Specialists add hands, never another layer between you and the person responsible.
A proven network, not a bench
Extra engineers are people our principal has already delivered with. The vetting happened on real programmes, over years — not on a CV the week before yours.
Continuity by design
Every stage ends in working, documented software you own outright: code, designs and the decisions behind them. If our principal were off the field tomorrow, you'd hold a complete running system at the last stage boundary, documentation a new team could pick up, and no licences pulling you back to us.
We also carry professional indemnity insurance, and the engineers in our network have delivered on these systems' patterns before. Dependency on any one person — including ours — is a design flaw, and we design it out.
Whatever the problem, the terms are the same.
We don't do time and materials. That just moves the delivery risk onto you. Every Meladian engagement bar the fractional CTO retainer works the same way:
A fixed price for an agreed outcome
Like a builder quoting a house. If it costs more than we said, that's our problem, not yours.
Stages of six weeks or less
Each stage ends in working software with stand-alone value, and a genuine exit point.
You own everything we deliver
All IP and code is yours from day one. Emerging dependencies are called out early and designed away: no lock-in.
Free until we both believe in it
The conversation and our first read of the problem cost nothing. You get a fixed quote before any money changes hands.
A fixed price only works if the outcome is fixed too. If we misjudged the work, we absorb it; the quote is the quote. If you change what's being built, that's not a failure, it's normal. It's re-quoted openly at the next stage boundary, before it's built, never argued about after. No variation-order games, no invoice surprises: the price only ever changes when the outcome does, and you'll agree the new number before we start.
The full step-by-step is on the home page.
Not every engagement starts with us holding the pen.
If you're a delivery partner or programme lead who needs this depth inside an existing programme (a modernisation lead, a solution architect, an agentic delivery capability), we take that role too, on terms that fit your contract. The accountability and the standard of work don't change; only the shape of the engagement does.
Talk to us about your programme →Which of these is your problem?
Start with the free conversation. And if a proof of concept is the right first step, it runs on your actual system: weeks, not months, reversible at every step.