Engagement model · Fixed scope, fixed price
Every Citadel engagement runs the same way: a working discovery call, a scoped fixed-price proposal, delivery under an explicit governance model, and a handover backed by evidence rather than slides. You know what a phase costs before you commit, and the person who scopes the work is the person who delivers it.
The same sequence whether the engagement is a $1,500 readiness assessment or a multi-quarter transformation. Only the scope changes.
Thirty minutes with a senior architect, free, no pitch deck. We map your stack, your constraints, and the highest-value, lowest-risk first step. If the engagement is the wrong shape for you — too early, too large, or better served by an independent assessor — you hear that on the call.
A written statement of work with named deliverables, milestones, and a fixed price, typically inside a master services agreement for ongoing work. There is no open-ended time-and-materials meter: an overrun inside the agreed scope is Citadel’s cost, and a scope change is a written amendment agreed before further work, never an invoice afterwards.
Work is delivered by the architect who scoped it. Every AI agent we deploy is a first-class principal with its own identity, scoped credentials, and full action logging, run at an autonomy tier you set: T1 agents read and report, T2 agents write under supervision, and T3 actions stay human-gated. Autonomy graduates as trust builds, never by default.
The engagement closes with artifacts, not a deck: runbooks, an attributable audit trail, and an executive readout with a prioritized plan written so you can act on it with your own team, another vendor, or Citadel. From there you operate it yourself with a clean handoff, or graduate into a monthly managed engagement.
Most engagements start small on purpose: a Tier-1 read-and-report agent or a fixed-price assessment, so there is a concrete deliverable early rather than a long ramp. The published entry point is the Agent Assurance Assessment: three weeks, $15,000, fixed scope, ending with a governed agent running in your environment. The full engagement and pricing picture, from one-off consulting to monthly retainers, is on the enterprise page, and the governance posture behind stage three is on the security & governance page.
Thirty minutes to find the highest-value first step. No obligation, and every engagement is scoped and priced before it starts.