Five questions prospects ask
before signing.
The five objections that come up most often in our first conversations with prospects — answered directly, in writing, by our team. If a question is not here, ask it directly through contact.
Every engagement is scoped on the first call, written down before billing starts, and carried through to hand-off by a single named engagement lead. Whether the answer lands on this page or in a follow-up email, the answer is a written one.
Direct answers, in writing.
The five questions below are the ones our team hears most often — and the ones a procurement team, a CTO, or a founder will ask before they sign the engagement letter. Each answer is written down so the same written scope carries into the work.
Our team prices by engagement — a written scope, a typical length, and a list of what you keep at the end. We are not a staffing pyramid and we are not in a price war with the systems integrators. We are a different class of vendor: a named engagement lead who carries the work end to end, with smaller overhead and a scope you can read.
For most of what we are hired for, the comparison reads like this — you pay for the engagement, not for an account manager, a partner, a junior team, and the layers between them. The three tiers on our pricing page are written so the cost and the deliverable line up on the same page, before billing starts.
A Discovery Sprint lands in one to two weeks. A Migration Project runs four to twelve weeks, depending on the surface area and the stack. A Monthly Retainer is rolling — it continues as long as there is work worth doing together, and ends when there isn't.
Variance comes from the seams — how much of the system is yours to read, how many integrations we are inheriting, whether AI systems are in scope and how much of the policy rail needs to be built new. We reason about the variance on the first call, in writing, before billing starts — and if the shape of the work changes, we discuss it before we do it, not after.
Intelligence engineering is the practice our CEO, Jameson, named for the work our team delivers: data engineering, AI systems and agents built on your data, and the governance that keeps AI output reliable and human-owned. It is the same three families across engagements — the stack you have decides which one carries the most weight.
- Ingest, transformation, and serving pipelines across managed cloud and on-prem — AWS, GCP, Azure, and bare metal — chosen per workload, not per habit.
- AI systems — model integrations, retrieval layers, evaluation harnesses — grounded in your data and held up by the policy rails around them.
- Governance — schema discipline, audit trails, and verification harnesses so a reviewer can trace any output back to its source.
Yes — Seneca is a veteran-owned small business. We flow down into federal and state set-aside contracting vehicles where the vehicle supports it. Ask us if your procurement team needs documentation; we will share what we have on file and note what your team needs to confirm on its side.
The NAICS codes we are most often scoped against are the consulting and IT-services families — examples that come up on our engagements:
- 541511 — Custom Computer Programming Services
- 541512 — Computer Systems Design Services
- 541519 — Other Computer Related Services
- 541715 — Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences (excluding Nanotechnology and Biotechnology)
On the day we hand off, your team owns everything we built — code, infrastructure, runbooks, and the verification artefacts that went with the build. The system is yours to run. Your team gets a written post-mortem and a hand-off document they can hold us to, and there is no proprietary tooling locked behind a Seneca login.
If you want our team back, the Monthly Retainer is the standing way to keep us on call — async review, code-review windows, a maintained backlog, and reactive triage when something breaks in the systems we built. We return once a quarter in writing, with a review of the system and the roadmap ahead. We do not promise to disappear, and we do not promise to stay longer than there is work worth doing together.
Ask the question not on this page —
we will write back.
A short note describing the system, the data, and the deadline. A written reply within one business day — with a read on whether our team is the right one to take it.
Every note is read by the engagement lead before the reply goes out. The reply is a written read — what is working, what is fragile, what we would change first, and whether our team is the right one to take the engagement. No deck, no discovery call on the calendar until you have read our read.