Saffron Designs builds the front of house. Saffron Automations builds the engine room. Saffron Apps builds the thing itself when nothing off the shelf fits. One house, one invoice, one number to call — and no gap between the enquiry arriving, somebody answering it, and the software that has to handle it.
Three questions. Thirty seconds. We will tell you which one you are, and you can check our working afterwards.
There is a single Saffron ladder, and every rung has exactly one name and one price everywhere it appears. This card shows the rungs that fit you. The top rung here is the entry rung of the next card — so if a colleague sends you a different Saffron rate card, you will find a continuation of this one, never a contradiction. You are looking at Card I of III — Local & Single-Location.
Every subscription you hold is a price somebody else controls, indexed to how many people you hire, how many sites you open and how much you take in card payments. That is a defensible thing to buy. It is not always the right thing to buy, and almost nobody does the arithmetic before signing.
Put in what you pay for software today and what a build would realistically cost. This applies 10% annual software inflation, 18% of build cost a year in maintenance, and no credit for anything else. If it says keep renting, keep renting — that is the answer we would give you in the room.
It fails more prospects than it passes, and we publish it anyway. A three-location med spa on $1,350 a month of software should not commission a $90,000 booking platform — that is 117 months of payback, and we would say so. A three-user trade business on $249 a month should not commission a $45,000 dispatch system — it never pays back. A twelve-truck contractor on $4,500 a month should commission a $90,000 field-operations platform — it pays for itself in month 27. We would rather lose the build than sell you one that never pays back.
The honest reference class for this work is not another agency. It is the payroll you would otherwise run. To do in-house what The Workshop does, you would be hiring a full-time receptionist and a part-time marketing coordinator — and you would still be buying the software.
Below is that arithmetic, done conservatively. It excludes recruiting fees, management time, ramp-up, turnover, software licences and the months where the role sits empty. Add those and the gap widens.
The one thing a software vendor can never offer you, and most agencies quietly avoid putting in writing. Here it is in writing.
| The source code | Yours | The repository, in your organisation, from the first commit — not at handover. |
| The data and the schema | Yours | Your database, your export, any time, in a format another engineer can read. |
| The accounts and credentials | Yours | Cloud, domains, app stores, API keys. In your name, billed to you, from day one. |
| The documentation and runbook | Yours | Written so another firm could take over on a Monday. We test that by writing it that way. |
| Saffron's shared engine components | Perpetual licence | The parts we reuse across clients stay ours — licensed to you perpetually, royalty-free and transferable if you sell the business. |
| Leaving | No charge | No exit fee, no handover fee, no data-export fee. Thirty days of transition support included. |
There is a second-order argument some finance teams care about: development costs of owned software can often be capitalised and amortised, where subscription fees cannot, which changes reported EBITDA even where the cash out is similar. The treatment depends on your reporting standard and your circumstances, and not every cost qualifies. Ask your accountant. Do not take it from us, and be wary of anyone who states it as a certainty.
Every tool below was built in-house, by us, for us, before it was ever offered to a client. Three of them are free and need no sign-up, no call and no card. Open one now, in another tab, before you read another word of this document. That is the demo — working software you can use in the next ten minutes, rather than a case study about somebody else.
Live Lighthouse diagnostics on any URL, including your competitors'.
Whole-site integrity engine. Audits every page, breakpoint and interaction, continuously.
Finds where your operation leaks revenue, before anyone tries to sell you anything.
Interviews you, then designs an enterprise-grade CRM architecture. No login, no call.
Ten specialist agents hunting revenue you are already losing, and recovering it.
Your business, answering questions in Telegram. Briefing you at 7am, every day.
Ten production-ready automation workflows. Point us at your stack and watch them go live.
The engine behind the builds. We made it for ourselves before anyone else saw it.
Every site we ship scores 95 or better on all four Lighthouse categories and carries zero axe violations on the pages we author. If it does not, the build is free. We publish our worst audit run of four, not our best.
If your first automated system is not live and producing verifiable action records within thirty days, that month is refunded. One email to billing. No forms and no retention call.
Code, data, accounts, credentials and documentation are in your name from day one, exportable at any time, with no exit fee. Twenty-six engagements delivered, zero disputes.
You do not need any of this to choose a tier. It is here because somebody on your team will want to check our working, and we would rather they could.
A bundle price means nothing until you can see what you are bundling. Every line below is sold on its own at the price shown. The tiers exist because the three houses compound — not because we will not sell them apart. Lines marked Published already appear openly at saffronautomations.com and are reproduced here unchanged.
Every line is sold separately at the price shown. This works out what the same scope costs à la carte, and whether a house tier covers it for less.
Name the thing. Two working days after the kickoff call you get a working, clickable prototype of its core flow, on real infrastructure, yours to keep whatever happens next. Miss the date and we refund it. Credited against any build commissioned within twelve months.
Data model, screens, integration map, build sequence and a fixed price with a fixed date. Written so another firm could build from it. Yours either way — we do not hold the plan hostage to the build.
Fixed after the Blueprint, against the scope written in it. A weekly demo of working software rather than a status report. Nothing on the web ships until Lighthouse and axe come back clean; native apps ship against the equivalent platform accessibility audit.
Hosting, monitoring, security patching, dependency upgrades and a support line. Indexed to CPI at renewal and to nothing else — not your headcount, your locations or your card volume.
Tell us the one flow that matters most — the booking, the intake, the quote, the dispatch. Two working days after the kickoff call we send you a link to a working, clickable prototype of it, on real infrastructure, in your brand. Not a mockup and not a slide: software you can put in front of a member of staff and watch them use.
It costs $1,500. Miss the date and we refund it. Commission a build within twelve months and it is credited in full. If you never build anything with us, you keep the prototype and the code anyway. We charge because free prototypes attract people who were never going to build — not because we need the money.
| Line | One-time build | Fee |
|---|---|---|
| Designs | Fast-Track Five Five pages. Seven days. 95+ across all four Lighthouse categories or the build is free. |
$6,500 |
| Designs | Signature Site Eight to twelve pages on a custom design system, preceded by Brand Soul. |
$14,000 |
| Designs | Brand Soul Colour, type, voice and personality defined before a single pixel is drawn. |
$7,500 |
| Automations | Booking flow — on your existing platform Your current booking tool, rebranded and rebuilt around deposits, reminders and no-show recovery. Not a new platform — that is in the matrix below. |
$4,500 |
| Automations | AI Front Desk — build Voice and chat agent trained on your services, hours, prices and objections. |
$3,500 |
| Automations | Automation Starter Two workflows: lead intake to CRM to follow-up, with verifiable action records. |
$4,500 |
| Automations | CRM Starter Kit — configured, not built Crimson, our free CRM architect, designs it and we deploy it on a platform you already pay for. A CRM built from scratch is in the matrix below. |
from$3,500 |
| What we build | Typical | Fixed fee |
|---|---|---|
Booking & scheduling platform
Deposits, staff and room resources, reminders, no-show recovery, waitlists. |
6–10 weeks | $18,000–$45,000 |
Client or patient portal
Records, documents, forms, payments and rebooking, in your brand. |
5–9 weeks | $15,000–$40,000 |
CRM — integrated into what you already run
Keep the platform, fix the model. Pipelines, fields, automations, reporting. |
3–5 weeks | $8,000–$20,000 |
CRM — built from scratch
When the platform is the problem. Your data model, your pipeline, your rules. |
8–12 weeks | $30,000–$50,000 |
Quoting & estimating tool
Priced options, e-signature, deposit capture, straight into the calendar. |
5–8 weeks | $15,000–$35,000 |
Owner dashboard
One screen. Every number that decides your week, from every system you run. |
4–7 weeks | $12,000–$30,000 |
Memberships & subscriptions
Plans, dunning, pauses, upgrades, usage limits, revenue recognition. |
6–10 weeks | $20,000–$45,000 |
Native iOS and Android app
Store-published, push notifications, offline-tolerant, in your name. |
10–16 weeks | $35,000–$75,000 |
Bands are ours, benchmarked against published US market rates for 2025–26. The figure you get is a single number with a date on it, not a range — fixed at the Blueprint, against the scope written in it. Scope changes are re-quoted before they are built; the date moves only for changes you ask for, or for access we are waiting on. Rush delivery adds 15–30%. Anything not on this list, ask — the list is what we are asked for most often, not the limit of what we do.
| The Keep$2,000 | The Workshop$3,900 | The Atelier$7,500 | The Foundry$12,500 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What the customer sees — Saffron Designs | ||||
| Your website from $600/mo alone | Built and hosted, no build fee | Built and hosted, no build fee | Custom build, yours outright | Custom build, yours outright |
| Site care & integrity from $450/mo alone | Care + Omnisphere | Care + Omnisphere | Care + Omnisphere | Care + CRO cycle |
| Search & content from $1,500/mo alone | — | Local SEO + Google Business | Local SEO + Google Business | Content engine, 8–12 assets/mo |
| Social & video from $1,600/mo alone | — | — | 2 platforms, 20 assets | 2 platforms, 20 assets |
| Paid media from $1,000/mo alone | — | — | Google Ads | Google Ads |
| What happens after — Saffron Automations | ||||
| AI agents from $500/mo alone | AI Front Desk | AI Front Desk | AI Front Desk | Voice + chat suite, all sites |
| Business intelligence from $1,000/mo alone | — | Concierge, daily briefing | Concierge, daily briefing | Concierge, daily briefing |
| Automation depth from $1,500/mo alone | 1–3 systems | 1–3 systems | Up to 8, one new monthly | Up to 8, one new monthly |
| Software you own — Saffron Apps | ||||
| Custom software & integrations from $900/mo alone | — | — | Integrations maintained | Integrations maintained |
| Service & assurance | ||||
| Human response | 7 working hrs | 7 working hrs | 7 working hrs | 7 working hrs |
| Engineering response | 5 working days | 5 working days | 48 hrs, prioritised | 48 hrs, prioritised |
| Reporting | Monthly brief | Daily brief + monthly | Daily brief + monthly | Daily + quarterly board |
| New automated systems included | Maintained, not added | Maintained, not added | 1 per month | 1 per month |
| Code, data and accounts in your name | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Month-to-month after 90 days | ● | ● | ● | ● |
Every row is a capability, not a product line — so a higher tier always holds at least as much of every row as the tier below it. Nothing is ever taken away as you move right. The figure under each row name is what that capability costs bought on its own.
Most local engagements start with a free X-Ray audit of the site you have and a five-minute Assay of the operation behind it. Neither requires a call.