How a Partner Package Works

Price and margin

What you pay, and what is left for you

Partner prices sit 20 percent below our published list. The margin column assumes you resell at our list price. Most partners price above it, because they are carrying the client relationship and the programme risk, and that is theirs to keep.

Package	Scope	Duration	Our list	You pay	Your margin at list
Bronze	1 channel, 1 use case	4 weeks	£25,000	£20,000	£5,000
Silver	1 channel, up to 6 use cases	6 to 8 weeks	£55,000	£44,000	£11,000
Gold	3 channels, up to 10 use cases each	8 to 12 weeks	£120,000	£96,000	£24,000

Those are the three fixed scope packages. Sustained delivery is priced by the quarter instead, set out under when a package is the wrong shape below. Every package includes what is listed on what it costs: the scope caps, the warranty period and the exclusions. Those do not change because you are a partner. The exclusions are the part worth reading, because they are what keeps a fixed price fixed.

The other unit

When a package is the wrong shape

A package is fixed scope, so it gets a fixed price. A workstream is not. Inside a multi million pound programme the work is a backlog that moves, and pretending a single total is honest would mean padding it or renegotiating it every month. So the unit is a quarter, not a scope.

What you buy. Three Rel8 engineers for a quarter, owning a named workstream and its backlog inside your programme. Rel8 directs the work and holds the deliverable, which is what keeps it a contract for services rather than a supply of people, and what your procurement team will want in writing.
What it costs. £132,000 a quarter at partner price, against £165,000 list. Larger and smaller squads scale from there. Billed monthly in arrears rather than against milestones, because a backlog has no single acceptance moment.
How it is accepted. The same ten gates, applied per release rather than once at the end. You get the evidence each time something reaches live traffic, unbranded, for your acceptance pack.
How it ends. Four weeks either side, at a quarter boundary. No tail, no wind-down fee, and the runbooks and decision records are current because they are deliverables throughout rather than a handover task.

If you are not sure which unit fits, the test is simple: if you can write down what done looks like, buy a package. If you cannot, because the programme will tell you in six weeks, buy a quarter.

Paper and money

Who signs what, and who invoices whom

You contract with your client. We contract with you. Two separate agreements. We have no contractual relationship with your client and we do not want one.
Your paper, not ours. Your master services agreement, your data processing agreement, your security schedule, your non-solicitation terms. We complete your supplier questionnaire rather than send you our template.
We invoice you, you invoice your client. On your payment terms to your client, and ours to you, which are separate numbers. We do not make our payment contingent on your client paying you, and we do not ask you to.
Your client never sees our name unless you put it there. Not on the repository, not on the architecture document, not on the gate evidence.

When money moves

Three stages, each against something delivered

The same structure we use with end clients, so nothing is hidden behind a partner discount. Every stage is tied to an artefact that exists rather than to a date, because UK procurement rarely pays on signature.

30 percent, on the architecture and scope document. Delivered in the first week or two. It names the use cases, the integrations and the exclusions, so what you are buying is written down before the build starts. It is also the document you hand your client.
40 percent, at first live traffic. The agent handling real contacts in your client's environment, not a demo in ours.
30 percent, on passing all ten gates. Evidenced in your client's environment against the published definitions. If it does not pass, we do not raise the invoice.

That last line is the one worth checking with us rather than taking on trust. The definitions are on how we measure, with the exclusions written in, so the standard is readable before you commit to it.

Acceptance

Proof of Production, the ten gates

Acceptance is against these, not against hours burned or our opinion of our own work. They are the same ten gates every Rel8 deployment passes, partner or direct, and the same ten the partner scorecard measures you against.

A cost per contact baseline, captured before anything is built
Containment with hang-ups, deflections and 48 hour repeat contacts taken out
A resolution counted only against a matching write in the system of record
Handover that carries full context, so the customer never repeats themselves
An evaluation suite that runs on every release, not a one-time accuracy test
Vulnerable customer guardrails, documented and tested inside a live call
Any individual decision replayable and auditable months later
p95 latency known under production load, not in a demo
A defined fallback when the model is unavailable or uncertain
Security review passed, with the findings closed

Gate evidence is produced in your client's environment and handed to you unbranded, so it goes into your acceptance pack rather than ours.

Honestly

Where the risk actually sits

You are in the middle of this, which creates two problems a direct engagement does not have. Both are better named now than discovered in week six.

What we carry

Effort risk. If the build takes longer than we estimated, that is our cost and the price does not move. If a milestone does not meet the written acceptance criteria, we fix it before invoicing rather than raise a change request. Fixed price means we priced that risk in, and it is the reason a fixed price is higher than a day rate multiplied by an optimistic estimate.

What you carry

Access and decisions. Environment access, data, integration endpoints, security review slots and sign-off all sit on your client's side, reached through you. If those slip, the date slips. We will not invoice you for waiting, and we will not absorb an open-ended delay either. The scope document names what we need and by when, so a slip is visible early rather than argued about at the end.

What happens when your client changes the scope

It goes through you, priced, before it is built. We will not take direction from your client, which protects you from a subcontractor quietly expanding the job and then billing you for it. If the change is small we will usually absorb it and say so. If it is not, you get a number and you decide whether to pass it on.

Will you put money at risk against the outcome?

Against our own acceptance criteria, yes. We will put 10 to 20 percent of the package at risk against the ten gates, which are things we control and which are published in advance. Not against your client's business metrics. Recovery rates, cost per contact and CSAT depend on your client's operations, staffing and change board, and a supplier who bets on those is either pricing it in somewhere you cannot see or has not thought about it.

What if we need to stop?

Four weeks either side. You pay for milestones already accepted and nothing further. Everything built to that point is in your client's repository, with the architecture document and whatever gate evidence exists, so a stopped package still leaves you something you can hand over.

How a partner package actually works