AI, cloud and engineering consulting · Australia
Enterprise-grade AI and engineering, without the enterprise invoice.
Sapientx is an Australian technology consultancy for startups and mid-sized businesses. Senior engineers build your AI, data and AWS cloud systems at a fixed price, then train your team to run them.
Working with teams in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and remotely across Australia and New Zealand.
Why work with Sapientx
No bench, no juniors
Every engagement is staffed by people with ten-plus years shipping production systems. You never pay to train our graduates.
Fixed prices, written down
You know the cost before we start. If scope changes, we re-quote in writing. There are no surprise timesheets.
Built to hand over
We document, record and teach as we go, so the system still works when we leave. Independence is the deliverable.
What we do
The same categories the big consultancies sell, scoped for teams of ten to two hundred people and priced so the work pays for itself inside a year.
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AI and automation
Custom assistants, agents and document-processing pipelines built on frontier models and your own data. We start with the workflow that costs you the most hours, not the most impressive demo.
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Data and analytics
A clean, governed data platform you can actually query. Pipelines from Xero, Shopify, HubSpot and your databases into a warehouse, with dashboards your team trusts.
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Cloud and DevOps
AWS architecture, migration and cost reduction. Infrastructure as code, CI/CD and monitoring set up once and explained properly. Every engagement starts with a cost review aimed at cutting your bill in the first quarter.
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Product engineering
Web and mobile products, APIs and integrations shipped by a small senior team. Good for a first version, a rebuild, or the feature your in-house team hasn't had time for.
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Security and compliance
Practical security for growing companies: Essential Eight alignment, Privacy Act readiness, access control and the evidence you need when an enterprise customer sends a questionnaire.
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Fractional CTO
Senior technical leadership for a few days a month: architecture decisions, vendor selection, hiring support and a roadmap your board can read. For founders who need a CTO before they can afford one.
How an engagement runs
Three stages, each with a fixed price and a definite end. You can stop after any of them and keep everything we produced.
Discover
We spend a week inside your business: interviews, systems review, data audit. You get a short written report ranking opportunities by return and effort, plus a fixed quote for the next stage.
One week · $4,900Build
A senior engineer and a lead work in sprints with weekly demos. Everything lives in your repositories and your cloud account from day one, so there is nothing to migrate later.
Three to ten weeks · fixed quoteHand over
Documentation, runbooks and recorded walkthroughs, followed by a training session for the people who will own the system. Optional light-touch support plan if you want us on call.
Included in every buildTraining and education
Short, hands-on courses taught by the engineers who do the work. Public sessions run monthly in Sydney and Melbourne and online; every course is also available in-house, tailored to your stack.
AI for business leaders
What today's AI can and cannot do, how to spot a real opportunity in your business, how to budget for it, and how to manage risk and privacy. No code. Leaves you able to brief a vendor and judge their answer.
Building with large language models
For developers. Prompting that holds up in production, retrieval over your own documents, tool use and agents, evaluation and cost control. You leave with a working assistant deployed on AWS.
AWS fundamentals for small teams
The 20% of AWS that covers 90% of what a growing company needs: accounts, networking, compute options, storage, IAM, and the billing alerts that stop nasty surprises.
Data literacy for operators
For ops, finance and marketing staff. Reading dashboards critically, asking better questions of your data team, and using spreadsheet and AI tools to answer the simple questions yourself.
Custom in-house program
Any course above, or a mix, delivered to your team on your systems and your data. Common formats are a one-day workshop or a four-week "learn while we build" program alongside a pilot.
What an engagement looks like
Illustrative examples of typical projects: the problem, what we built, and the results this kind of work aims for. See all examples.
Quote preparation cut from five hours to under one
A commercial insurance broker automates the rekeying of client submissions with document AI and human review.
Read the case study →Example engagement · Data and analytics · RetailOne version of margin for a direct-to-consumer brand
An online retailer replaces a five-day month-end spreadsheet process with a tested data platform, and finds the products losing money.
Read the case study →Example engagement · Cloud and DevOps · SaaSAWS bill cut by 38% in one quarter
A B2B software company reduces its cloud bill, moves to infrastructure as code and passes an enterprise security review.
Read the case study →Pricing
Three ways to work with us. Each has a price you can take to your board before we start, and none has a minimum term.
Sprint
$4,900 one week
For teams who know something should be automated but not what.
- Stakeholder interviews and systems review
- Ranked opportunity report
- Architecture sketch for the top option
- Fixed quote for a pilot
Build
from $18,000 fixed quote
For a defined pilot or production system, delivered end to end.
- Senior engineer plus a lead, dedicated
- Weekly demos, code in your repositories
- Documentation, runbooks and handover training
- Thirty days of fixes after launch
Partner
from $3,500 per month
For ongoing technical leadership or support without a full-time hire.
- Fractional CTO or named engineer
- Set days per month, roll over unused
- Architecture, hiring and vendor decisions
- Cancel with thirty days' notice
All prices in Australian dollars, excluding GST. Build quotes depend on scope; most pilots land between $18,000 and $45,000. Registered startups under two years old get 15% off their first engagement.
Why Sapientx exists
- Founded
- Sydney, Australia
- Team
- Senior engineers and architects, ex-enterprise consulting and product companies
- Clients
- Startups and businesses of 10 to 200 people across Australia and New Zealand
- Platforms
- AWS first, with Microsoft and Google Cloud where you already live
The big consultancies do excellent work and charge accordingly. That leaves most Australian businesses with a choice between an invoice they can't justify and a freelancer they can't rely on.
Sapientx was started by engineers who spent years inside those large firms and wanted to bring the same rigour to smaller companies at a fraction of the overhead. No account managers, no bench, no pyramid of juniors learning on your project. Just the people who do the work, talking to you directly.
We also think the fastest way to make a business genuinely capable with AI is to teach the people in it, which is why training sits beside consulting rather than behind it.
Common questions
The things most founders and operators ask on the first call.
How much does AI consulting cost for a small business in Australia?
With Sapientx, a one-week discovery sprint is $4,900 and a working AI pilot starts from $18,000 at a fixed price. Most pilots land between $18,000 and $45,000. All prices are in AUD and exclude GST.
Do you only work with companies in Sydney?
No. We are based in Sydney and work in person in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and remotely with businesses across Australia and New Zealand.
Who owns the code and the AI system you build?
You do. Everything lives in your own repositories and cloud account from day one, and there are no lock-in contracts.
Is our data safe when you build AI on it?
We build inside your cloud account, follow Privacy Act and Essential Eight guidance, and choose model providers and regions that keep your data where it needs to be. We document the data flows so you can answer customer and auditor questions.
What happens after the project ends?
Every build includes documentation, runbooks, recorded walkthroughs and a training session for the people who will own the system, plus thirty days of fixes after launch. An optional monthly support plan is available.
Book a 30-minute call
Pick a time that suits you and you'll be talking to an engineer, not a salesperson. We'll tell you whether we can help and roughly what it would cost, on the call.
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Prefer to write?
Tell us what's slowing you down and we'll reply within one business day.