Talk to a builder — before you spend a dollar on software.
For the owners staring at a five-figure vendor quote wondering if there's a smaller answer. Talk to someone who actually builds this stuff before you sign — the fastest win is usually the tools you already pay for. From $250.
What you always get from us.
Not perks — the floor.
- Honest answers
- No upsell to our own build work
- Written doc you can keep
- Vendor-neutral
- Fixed price, not hourly
- NDA on request
How we actually think about this.
Builder bias, not consultant bias. The goal is fewer problems, not bigger projects.
Start with what you already pay for
Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Azure, GCP — most SMBs are paying for tools they barely touch. Power Automate, Loop, Apps Script, Fabric. The first audit step is always 'what's already in the bill?'
Builder bias, not consultant bias
We've shipped the things we're advising on. That changes the recommendation — we know what's a two-hour fix and what's a six-month black hole.
Plain-English, not slide-decks
You get a short doc you can read in ten minutes and forward to your bookkeeper. No maturity matrices, no 'strategic transformation roadmap.'
Do less, better
Most software problems aren't software problems — they're a process nobody wrote down. We'd rather kill a tool than add one.
What this looks like in practice.
Recent calls: a $50K Salesforce quote talked down to a $4K Airtable + Apps Script setup. A six-figure 'reporting platform' replaced with three Power BI dashboards on Fabric the client already owned. A 'we need a custom app' conversation that ended with 'you need a shared Loop page and 90 minutes of training.' Sometimes the answer is just no.
Three ways to start. Pick the one that fits the question.
Fixed-price, scoped before we start, and the deliverable is always something written you can keep.
Power Hour
- Timeline
- Within 1 week
- Format
- 60-min call + written follow-up
- Languages
- English
- 30-minute prep on the materials you send
- 60-minute focused call (recorded if you want)
- Plain-English written summary within 48 hours
- Specific next-step recommendations
Audit
- Timeline
- 1–2 weeks
- Format
- Written audit + readout call
- Languages
- English
- Kickoff call to scope what's in and what's out
- Read-only access review of the system in scope
- License + spend inventory (what's paid, what's used)
- Low-hanging fruit list — ranked by effort vs. payoff
Embedded
- Timeline
- 2–6 weeks
- Format
- Working sessions + written plan
- Languages
- English
- Weekly working sessions (async-first, sync when needed)
- Sit-in on vendor pitches, demos, and quote reviews
- RFP scoping or vendor shortlist with reasoning
- Written plan: what to build, buy, kill, or postpone
One-offs and follow-ups, when you need them.
Bolt onto an engagement, or come back when something new lands on your desk.
Quote sanity-check
$150Send us a vendor quote, SOW, or contract. You get a written read in 48 hours: what's fair, what's padded, what to push back on.
Platform comparison memo
$400–$800Two or three platforms compared on the dimensions that actually matter for you — cost, lock-in, fit, exit cost. Not a Gartner quadrant.
Second-opinion call
$20030-minute call to pressure-test a recommendation you got from someone else. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're not.
Written roadmap doc
$500–$1.5KA 6–12 month sequenced plan — what to do first, what to defer, where the dependencies are. Something you can actually run against.
Vendor RFP help
$1K–$3KWe write the RFP, run the vendor calls with you, and score the responses. You make the call — with a real comparison in front of you.
Office-hours retainer
$300–$600 / moA standing 60-minute slot each month plus async questions. For when you want a builder on speed-dial without committing to a project.
How an engagement actually goes.
A free call, a scoped engagement, real work, a written deliverable. No 90-day discovery phases.
Free 20-minute intro call
Tell us what's on your desk. We'll tell you whether a Power Hour, an Audit, an Embedded engagement, or 'honestly, you're fine' fits best. No pitch deck.
Engagement scoped + booked
One-page scope: what's in, what's out, price, timeline, deliverable. You sign, we send a calendar invite and an intake.
Working sessions / audit / discovery
Depending on the engagement — a focused call, a tenant walkthrough, vendor sit-ins, or weekly working sessions. We share what we're finding as we find it, not at the end.
Written summary + recommendations
You get a plain-English doc with what we found and what to do about it, ranked by effort vs. payoff. We do a readout call. You keep the doc whether you keep working with us or not.
Things people usually ask.
Fair question, and the way the consulting works is set up specifically to prevent that. You're paying a fixed price for a written recommendation that you keep — and that you can hand to any developer or builder, not just us. If our recommendation does end up pointing toward building something, it's because nothing simpler fit, not because we needed the work. You're under zero obligation to hire us for what comes next, and plenty of clients don't — that's totally fine.
That happens regularly, actually — and it's still a successful outcome. You paid for an honest answer, you got one, and you potentially saved yourself a five-figure mistake. The cheapest engagement (the Power Hour) exists partly because "no, don't build that" is a perfectly good answer to walk away with, and you shouldn't have to pay much to get to it.
By keeping it structurally simple. No referral kickbacks from any vendor, no formal "partner program" arrangements, no "certified" badges we're trying to maintain. We do have strong opinions about specific platforms — opinions formed by actually building on them, not from a marketing brochure — but we have no financial incentive to push one product over another. The recommendation is whatever we'd actually pick if we were running your business.
Yes — happy to sign a mutual NDA, usually within 24 hours of you asking. Specific vendor names, contract numbers, internal documents, and anything else sensitive stays strictly between us. We also won't ever name your business in a case study or marketing without your explicit written permission, NDA or no NDA.
Easy — if you want to keep going, we can roll right into an Embedded engagement (where we work alongside your team), an office-hours retainer (a few hours a week for ad-hoc questions), or scope a separate build entirely. If you don't, we don't. There's no lock-in clause, no "minimum further engagement" fine print, no awkward conversations. If we're done, we're done.
Tell us what's on your desk. We'll tell you if Attuned Ventures is the right call.
20-minute intro call, no pitch deck, no obligation. Worst case you walk away with a clearer picture of the problem and a sharper sense of what it'll take to fix it.