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Hlebourg

Services

Six services, each fixed-price, each closing a place where deployments die

None of these is sold by the hour. Every one has a subject, a published price and a completion test that you run rather than we do — because a service whose result cannot be demonstrated is a justification for an hourly rate, not a deliverable.

What a service has to have before we will sell it

Professional services in this market are usually the margin that rescues a thin licence. We would rather they were the part you can check. Three rules, applied to all six:

  • One

    A subject, not an intention

    The deliverable is a thing you keep — a completed assessment, a configuration you own, an exported dataset. Not a recommendation and not a deck.

  • Two

    A completion test you run

    Your engineer rebuilds the environment without us. Your council signs. You read your own data back with software that is not ours. We do not grade our own work.

  • Three

    A price printed here

    Fixed fee, on this page, before the call. A price that only exists after a discovery session is a price that was calculated from your budget.

The six

What we actually do

In the order they tend to happen: prove it, clear the legal path, install it, connect it to your agents, check that it works, and leave cleanly.

  1. 01

    Fixed-scope pilot

    Ninety days, one team, a criterion written down before we start

    Why this exists

    The category cannot distinguish a working deployment from an expensive one. Vendors report logins, participation and app engagement because those are the numbers they have, and a renewal conversation then turns on whose anecdote is louder.

    One product, one real team, ninety days. We agree the success criterion in writing before installation — a number, a date and a threshold — and we publish the result against it whether or not it favours us. The pilot runs on your infrastructure with your data, because a pilot on ours proves nothing about the deployment you would actually buy.

    What you are left holding

    • A written success criterion, agreed and dated before any software is installed
    • A working installation in your environment, not a hosted demonstration tenancy
    • The measured result against the criterion, including the runs that went badly
    • Your data exported in a documented format, whether you continue or stop
    Done when
    You hold the measurement and the exported data. If the criterion was not met we say so in the report, and the pilot fee is the whole commitment — there is no clause that converts a failed pilot into a subscription.
    Commercial
    Fixed fee, €9,000. Credited in full against the first year if you continue.
    Duration
    90 days
  2. 02

    Regulatory clearance

    The works-council and DPIA file, produced as a deliverable

    Why this exists

    In Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and France this is where deals die — after the budget is approved. Austrian §96 ArbVG is an outright veto with no arbitration fallback; the Dutch WOR Article 27 consent right turns on what a system is capable of observing rather than what you intend to observe; skipping CSE consultation in France is délit d'entrave. Every vendor treats the resulting paperwork as a professional-services afterthought. It is the longest pole in the deployment.

    We produce the file your data protection officer and your works council actually need, for the specific processing the product performs, with the national overlay that applies to you. Not a template with your logo on it — a completed assessment naming the fields, the lawful basis per purpose, and the least-intrusive alternative we considered and rejected.

    What you are left holding

    • A completed DPIA for the specific processing, with necessity and proportionality reasoning
    • A legitimate-interest assessment per purpose, and no consent-based design for core processing
    • An objective system-capability disclosure — what the product can observe, not what we intend it to — because co-determination turns on capability
    • A draft works agreement, with the national overlay: §87(1)(6) BetrVG, WOR Art. 27, ArbVG §96, CSE consultation under L2312-38
    • An AI Act classification dossier with the Article 5 analysis and the Annex III position argued either way
    • A worker-facing notice, and the record that workers were informed before the system went into service
    Done when
    Your works council or its expert signs, or tells you what is missing in writing. We hold back half the fee until one of those two things has happened.
    Commercial
    Fixed fee from €14,000 per product per jurisdiction. Half on delivery, half on council sign-off.
    Duration
    4–8 weeks, dependent on your council's own calendar
    Applies to Cadence only.
  3. 03

    Self-hosted deployment

    Installed in your tenancy, by people who will not hold your data

    Why this exists

    Self-hosted is our default, and the default is the hard part. Identity, data paths, sizing, key custody and the upgrade story are where a self-hosted product becomes shelfware — and a vendor whose commercial interest runs the other way has no reason to make it easy.

    We install the product into infrastructure you control, wire it to your identity provider and your data sources, and hand over the runbook. The deployment is reproducible from configuration you own: if you rebuild it without us in eighteen months, it comes up the same.

    What you are left holding

    • A working installation in your own tenancy, air-gapped if that is what you need
    • Identity integration, role mapping and the access model written down
    • Declarative configuration you hold, from which the deployment can be rebuilt without us
    • A runbook covering upgrade, backup, restore and the failure modes we know about
    • A sizing note based on your measured volumes rather than a bracket on a price sheet
    Done when
    Your own engineer rebuilds the environment from the configuration, without us in the room, and it comes up. That is the acceptance test.
    Commercial
    Fixed fee from €6,500 per product. Air-gapped installations quoted separately.
    Duration
    2–4 weeks
  4. 04

    Agent integration

    MCP servers wired into your agent estate, with the limits enforced server-side

    Why this exists

    Tool-selection accuracy degrades sharply once an agent is carrying roughly forty tools, and most estates are already past that. Meanwhile MCP tool annotations are hints — a server can describe a destructive tool as read-only and nothing stops it. An integration that ignores both facts works in a demonstration and fails in production.

    We connect the servers you actually need to the agents that actually need them, scope each tool to what its human operator may already do, and put the enforcement in the server rather than in the annotation. Then we wire the audit trail into your own logging, so an agent action is attributable without asking us.

    What you are left holding

    • Server selection and tool scoping per agent role, sized against the accuracy cliff rather than installed wholesale
    • Server-side enforcement of every read, write and act boundary, independent of client-side annotations
    • Audit records delivered into your SIEM with human identity, agent identity, arguments, authorisation context and lineage to the triggering request
    • Transport and authorisation configured to current practice, with no token passthrough
    • A written statement of what each agent can reach and what it cannot, reviewable by someone who did not build it
    Done when
    You run an agent against the estate and read the audit trail without our help, and a deliberately over-scoped request is refused by the server rather than by the prompt.
    Commercial
    Fixed fee from €7,500 for up to three servers. Included with a pilot at no charge.
    Duration
    2–3 weeks
  5. 05

    Independent evaluation design

    We design the study that could show our product does not work

    Why this exists

    The strongest evidence a sceptical finance director will bring to a renewal is Fleming's study of 46,336 UK workers across 233 organisations, which found individual-level wellbeing interventions no better than nothing. The vendor answer to that is usually a case study with a number in it. Pre-registered, organisation-randomised, third-party evaluation is a position nobody in this market has claimed.

    We design an evaluation with the outcome registered in advance, run by someone who is not us, capable of returning a negative result. You commission the evaluator directly; we supply the instrument documentation, the data extract and the methodology, and we do not see the analysis before you do.

    What you are left holding

    • A pre-registered evaluation protocol with the primary outcome and analysis fixed before data collection
    • Randomisation at the organisational unit, not the individual, where the design allows it
    • A documented data extract sufficient for an external analyst to reproduce the result
    • A written statement of what a negative result would look like, agreed before the study runs
    Done when
    The protocol is registered and the evaluator is contracted by you. What the study finds is then out of our hands, which is the entire point.
    Commercial
    Fixed fee €11,000 for the design. The evaluator is engaged and paid by you, not by us.
    Duration
    3–5 weeks to design; the study runs on its own clock
    Applies to Cadence only.
  6. 06

    Exit and migration

    Priced at zero, because a priced exit is a hostage arrangement

    Why this exists

    Locked question wording is what makes a survey trend comparable, which is also what makes leaving a vendor mean losing your history. Proprietary ciphertext formats are worse: Twilio's wind-down of Ionic Machina is the precedent everyone in encryption procurement now cites. A product that is hard to leave is a product whose renewal conversation is not honest.

    Whenever you want to leave, we run the export with you: full history in a documented format, the instrument and question library that makes the history comparable, and a standalone decryptor for anything encrypted. We also run this on request while you are still a customer, because an exit path you have never tested is not an exit path.

    What you are left holding

    • Complete history in a documented, versioned format, with the schema published
    • The question library and instrument definitions, so longitudinal comparability survives the move
    • A standalone decryptor depending on nothing of ours, for any ciphertext we hold
    • Written confirmation of deletion from our side, and the retention we could not reach because it sits upstream
    Done when
    You read your own data back with software that is not ours. We will run the rehearsal on any anniversary you like, at the same price.
    Commercial
    No charge, during the contract and after it.
    Duration
    1–2 weeks

The arrangement

What we will not do

Stated here because each of these is normal in this market, and each one is how a professional-services line becomes the product.

No open-ended engagement

Every service above has an end date and a fee that does not move because the work took longer than we estimated. If we scoped it wrong, that is our error and we absorb it.

No failed pilot that becomes a subscription

There is no clause converting an unmet criterion into a paid year. The pilot fee is the whole commitment, and the criterion is agreed in writing before anything is installed.

No charging for the exit

Export costs nothing, during the contract and after it, and we will rehearse it on any anniversary you like. A renewal conversation held with your history as collateral is not an honest one.

No grading our own homework

The evaluation service is designed so that the analysis happens somewhere we cannot see it, and the protocol fixes the outcome measure before the data exists. A study we could not lose is not evidence.

Start with the pilot

It is the only one of the six that makes sense on its own, and the other five are easier to judge once something is running.

Request a pilotAsk a question firstSee product pricing

Hlebourg is a licensed software design and systems consultancy in Dubai. Services are contracted from there; deployment happens wherever your infrastructure is.