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How we work, in full

The standard we hold ourselves to, what goes in the contract, and how an engagement starts and what it costs. The homepage has the short version; this is the whole of it.

01The standard

Why Godwit

A bird almost nobody has heard of, doing something no other animal can.

The bar-tailed godwit crosses the Pacific from Alaska to New Zealand without landing, not because it is impressive, but because there is nowhere to land. No island, no ship, no halfway. It cannot fly seventy per cent of the way and call that a crossing.

ALASKA NEW ZEALAND
  • 11,000 kmAlaska to New Zealand
  • 9–11 dayscontinuously airborne
  • No landingno food, no water, no rest
One unbroken line, because that is the whole of it.

We hold ourselves to the same test. A migration is finished when the business is running on it, not when the last workload copies across. A dashboard is finished when somebody opens it on a Monday. A platform is finished when more than one person can keep it alive. We stay until then.

The part that actually matters

We engage people with deep industry experience: more than two decades of hands-on work across cloud infrastructure, security, delivery operations, web and mobile engineering and IT strategy.

They are the people on the task, and they own the outcome to the end of it.

The name and the mark

Godwit AI Labs is named for that bird, and the two strokes beside the wordmark are its wings on the long crossing.

Godwit AI Labs logo
The Godwit AI Labs logo.
02Commitments

What we commit to in writing

Most of what goes wrong between a client and an IT partner is structural, not technical. So these go in the contract.

You pay for the setup, not the hours

Our fee is attached to a working migration, a network that is live, an application in production or a service being run, not to advisory time. If an engagement produces a recommendation and nothing else, that is a failure on our side of the table, not a deliverable.

We work alongside your IT team, not around it

Where there is an internal team, they stay the people who know the estate, and we are scoped around what they do not have the time or the specialism for. We will not quietly accumulate the knowledge that makes them hard to replace, and we will not route their work through us. Where there is no team yet, we are it until there is, and we hand over rather than hold on.

No vendor quota, so the advice is not vendor-funded

We are vendor-agnostic across the cloud OEMs and carry no quota, rebate or referral fee with any of them. There is no version of a recommendation here that is worth more to us than another, so when we say a workload should stay where it is, that is the whole reason.

The markup on kit is minimal, and you can see it

Where we supply hardware and licences, the markup is minimal, realistic and shown on the quote as its own line. If you would rather contract with the seller and pay them directly, that works too and nothing is routed through us. Either way the engineering is a separate line you can question.

Hardware & licences
minimal markup · shown on the quote
Engineering
the only line that is ours
People, not a queue

You deal with the people who built it, and a phone number for when it matters. If we ever can't staff that properly, we'll tell you before we take the work.

Everything is yours from day one

As-builts, runbooks, Terraform, credentials and monitoring live in your accounts and your repo. Leaving us should be boring. That's deliberate.

And one that isn't a clause

If the fix is a config change or a licence review rather than a project, we'll say so. We'd rather have a small piece of work and a client who calls us again.

03Engagements

A short engagement, a fixed fee

Short enough that you're not betting anything on us, and useful even if you never call again.

Each one is a fixed scope with a fixed fee, agreed before it starts. We quote against what the work actually is rather than against a rate card, which is how the number stays honest, and how the smallest of these stays small enough to be worth trying us on.

Talk to us about this
1 week

A snapshot of one estate

The smallest step worth taking. Billing export access plus a read-only role is enough for us to come back with what your cloud or network is actually costing you, and where it is exposed.

Our feeFixed + GST · the smallest step we offer
You getA costed findings list ranked by effort and risk, and a straight answer on whether a fuller review would pay for itself
2 weeks

Cloud assessment & cost optimisation

A line-by-line read of your cloud or hybrid estate. Over-provisioned hardware, governance gaps and idle spend, each costed and ranked by effort and risk.

Our feeFixed + GST, or a share of the saving
You getA costed savings plan, and if there's little in there, we say so in week one
2 weeks

Network review

Your as-is topology documented properly, often for the first time. Risks, single points of failure, support-contract gaps, and what to do in what order.

Our feeFixed + GST · scoped on the estate
You getAn as-built you own, a target design and a phased plan you can budget
2 weeks

Security posture review

Identity, endpoints, cloud configuration and whether you would notice an incident, scored by the risk you actually carry, not by how alarming each item sounds. Includes a DPDP data map where it applies.

Our feeFixed + GST · scoped on the estate
You getA risk register with owners and dates, split into what needs budget and what needs a decision
6–10 weeks

An application for one process

The approval that waits in an inbox, the report typed twice, the month-end reconciled by hand. Built, hosted and run, for a nominal cost upfront and a price per transaction after that.

Our feenominal upfront + GST, then per transaction
You getA working application, the source in your repository, and us running it
Fixed scope

A migration or a build

A defined set of workloads or a defined site, an agreed date, an agreed SLA and a rollback path. We don't start until the scope is small enough to be certain about.

Our feeFixed scope, fixed price + GST
You getThe thing working, on a date you can plan a business around

Your money, not oursAn estate spending ₹10 lakh a month, at the 20% we aim for, keeps about ₹24 lakh a year, which is the number the assessment is really about. Ours is a fraction of it, and we would rather talk about the saving than about our invoice.

Ongoing, not a one-offManaged services and network AMC run as a monthly support retainer or a variable model, sized on the estate rather than on a headcount we would like to bill.