LevelFive is what you design when you start from what the work actually requires, not from what a services business needs to bill.
Consultancy was built to sell human time. You hire six people, bill them at a day rate, take a margin, and repeat. It worked for decades because there was no other way to get software built.
Agents changed the equation. Two senior people with AI-native tooling now ship what a six-person scrum team used to ship, often with fewer defects because every decision sits with someone senior. The work is the same. The economics are not.
So we started LevelFive, built from scratch on the new model: small teams, AI-native delivery, fixed prices, senior-only.
The reason this matters beyond our own P&L: serious product work has been locked behind seven-figure consultancy budgets and large in-house teams for too long. If a mid-market company has a real product problem, they should be able to ship a great solution without hiring a team they cannot afford or paying an old-model consultancy to bill it slowly. That is the change we are working towards.
Code scaffolding, test generation, repetitive refactors, infrastructure, documentation. All of it goes to agents.
Architecture, product calls, commercial decisions, anything where being wrong is expensive.
If we cannot ship it to your staging environment on a Friday, we have not done the work.
It aligns us with your outcome. Day rates align us with your calendar.
We will turn work down rather than take it with the wrong team. No growth target makes us staff up with people we do not trust.
No bait and switch. Ever.
Five values, one for each level in LevelFive. They are how we hire, and what we hold each other to when nobody is checking timesheets.
We tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. If the brief is wrong, we say so before we start, not after the budget is gone. The fixed-price model gives us permission to be honest, because we are not protecting billable hours.
Everyone in the network has been doing this long enough to know what good looks like. The standard is: would you put your name on this? Part of the craft is knowing when good enough is genuinely enough. Perfectionism that misses a deadline is self-indulgence, not craft.
If the spec is wrong, we fix the spec. If the approach is not working, we change the approach. We do not shrug and say "that is what you asked for." When something goes wrong on our watch, we own it and fix it. The contract is not a shield.
The best answer today might be wrong tomorrow, especially with AI changing what is possible every few months. We hire people who ask the obvious questions, change their mind when the evidence changes, and assume they are missing something. They usually are.
Every person on your engagement is senior, hired slowly and trusted to make the call. Once the work starts, nobody is checking their timesheets or second-guessing their architecture. Tools and AI amplify their judgement; the human is always accountable for the result.
The five values grow into something more binding: a written Code of Conduct that everyone here affirms at onboarding, founders included. We call it our digital Hippocratic oath because the first promise is the one medicine makes: do no harm to the people who live with what we build.
It runs to eleven commitments, written in first person, and it is what we go back to when a judgement call gets hard, on your engagement and inside the studio.
Two co-founders running the studio. Both still build, ship, and stay close to the work. The studio is new, the people are not: Sarat founded and led a consultancy for 19 years before LevelFive.
Sarat is co-founder and operator. Twenty years building digital products and the teams that ship them. He runs the commercial side of the studio, from the first conversation through to signed engagement, and the day-to-day operations behind it. Like everyone else at LevelFive, he still builds.
Alan is co-founder and builder. Twenty years in production software, the last of them shipping agentic workflows in live environments. He owns architecture, delivery, and the bar for what we ship. Most weeks you will find him in the codebase alongside the team.
We are not hiring a staff of a hundred. The team on your engagement is drawn from a small, carefully assembled network of senior people we have worked with for years. Engagement leads, product designers, product builders. Every one of them has shipped software that real users pay for. Every one can hold a whole product in their head.
If the right associates are not available for your timeline, we will tell you up front, not three weeks in.
Most of us are in the North East of England, with associates across the UK. Engagements are hybrid by default: kickoff and the moments that matter in person, the rest remote with weekly check-ins. We get on a train when the work needs us in the room.
In Good to Great, Jim Collins lays out a hierarchy of leadership. Level 1 is a capable individual. Level 2 is a contributing team member. Level 3 is a competent manager. Level 4 is an effective leader who rallies a team to a clear vision. Level 5 is the rare pairing he found in the leaders of companies that quietly outperformed for decades: personal humility plus professional will. Ambitious for the work, modest about themselves, harder on the standard than on the people.
We picked the name because it described the people we wanted on every engagement, and the company we wanted to be when nobody was buying. It is also a useful check on ourselves. Two senior builders with agents can ship what a team of six used to ship, but the work still needs Level 5 judgement to be worth shipping. That part does not get automated.
