HelmUnit places a senior AI & automation engineer inside your business — documenting how the work really happens, automating it, and measuring that it holds up in production. You buy a fraction of that person rather than all of one, priced and invoiced in Swedish kronor, and you can stop at the end of any month. Everything runs in the EU by default, which for a Swedish company means GDPR is answered before the question is asked.
Sweden has the heaviest employer contribution of the five countries we price separately, and it is the part that most often gets left out of the internal business case. Here is the whole number.
| What you pay for | Year one | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Base salary | SEK 800,000 | A senior AI engineer with 8+ years’ experience, national average. Stockholm and the big tech employers pay more. |
| Arbetsgivaravgifter | + SEK 251,000 | Employer social contributions at 31.42% of gross salary — the standard 2026 rate. |
| Recruiter fee | + SEK 144,000 | A contingency search at 18% of first-year salary, mid-range for a specialist role. |
| Before they have shipped anything | SEK 1,195,000 | And 4–9 months to recruit, then 1–3 more to ramp. |
The 31.42% is the line worth pausing on. It is not a rounding error on top of a salary — it is nearly a third again, applied to every krona, from the first month. A SEK 800,000 offer is a SEK 1,051,000 payroll cost before anyone has written a recruiter a cheque.
None of which makes hiring wrong. If the work is continuous, permanent and enough to fill a week, hire — we say where fractional loses on our comparison page, and this is one of the two places it does. But most Swedish companies in the 150–1,500 range have somewhere between a quarter and a half of an engineer’s worth of AI work, and no way to buy it in that size.
A quarter of our engineer is SEK 46,000 a month, starts next week, and ends whenever you say so. You own the code, the data and the documentation from day one.
Sources: salary from ERI SalaryExpert, senior AI engineer in Sweden with 8+ years’ experience, 2026; employer contribution rate 31.42% for 2026 per Skatteverket, as summarised by Mercans and nordisketax.net; recruiter fee at the midpoint of the 15–30% of first-year salary charged across Europe for specialist permanent placement.
Quoted and invoiced in Swedish kronor. Introductory rates for our first cohort — whatever rate you start on is the rate you keep.
Analysis at the start, steady improvement at the end. For smaller firms, often enough for the whole journey.
Steady building. The typical pace for a small firm's backlog — or continuous improvement at a mid-sized one.
A full engineer. For mid-sized firms clearing a real backlog — scale down when it's done, or add a second engineer if the backlog justifies it.
Finished building for now? Everything we built stays monitored, patched, and improved in small steps — without paying for capacity you no longer need.
Commit to twelve months and take 10% off any tier. Month-to-month stays month-to-month — cancel anytime, as always.
Listed rates are for remote delivery. We do come on-site in Sweden — and prefer to, especially while we are mapping how your work really happens — but that is a fraction of an engagement, not the shape of it. On-site days are quoted separately, by destination and duration.
All prices exclude VAT. HelmUnit invoices from AzureVibes, s.r.o. in the Czech Republic, so a business customer in Sweden receives an invoice carrying no Czech VAT and accounts for the tax locally. Your finance team will recognise the treatment.
20 August 2026. These are real invoiceable prices, not a conversion of the euro rate — we quote and invoice in this currency and carry the exchange-rate risk ourselves. They are rounded well clear of spot so ordinary currency movement never changes what you were quoted.
In the EU by default, in environments you control — which for a Swedish company usually settles the question outright. If a customer contract or a sector rule requires hosting inside Sweden specifically, we deploy there instead. You own the environment, the credentials and the data from day one, your documents are never used to train models, and we keep your EU AI Act transparency and documentation obligations in order as part of the service.
Prefer the euro price, or based outside Sweden? The standard EUR pricing applies everywhere else in Europe. If you want the method rather than the price, start with what a forward deployed engineer is.
HelmUnit starts at SEK 46,000 per month for a quarter of a senior AI and automation engineer — roughly five days of capacity a month. A half engineer is SEK 86,000 and a full engineer SEK 160,000 per month. Once the building is done and the work is mostly monitoring, the engagement scales down to SEK 23,000 a month. Every tier is month-to-month and cancellable, and prices are quoted and invoiced in kronor rather than converted from euros at billing time.
In year one, yes, and by a wide margin. A senior AI engineer on SEK 800,000 costs about SEK 1,195,000 in the first year once 31.42% arbetsgivaravgifter and a recruiter fee are included — and 4–9 months of that year is spent recruiting. From year two a full-time hire doing genuinely full-time work is cheaper than our full-engineer tier. The question is whether you have a full engineer’s worth of AI work every week, permanently. Most companies of 150 to 1,500 people do not.
Yes. The price on this page is the price on the invoice — we quote in SEK, invoice in SEK, and carry the exchange-rate risk rather than passing a conversion on to you. HelmUnit invoices from AzureVibes, s.r.o. in the Czech Republic, so as a Swedish business you receive an invoice with no Czech VAT and account for the tax locally under the reverse charge.
Yes, by default. We deploy into environments you control and host in the EU unless you ask otherwise; hosting inside Sweden specifically is available on request. Your documents are never used to train anyone’s models, and you own the code, the data and the documentation from day one. EU AI Act transparency and documentation obligations are handled as part of the service.
Mostly, yes — listed rates cover remote delivery, and the building, testing and monitoring are all done just as well remotely. We do travel to Sweden, and prefer to during the early mapping work, because watching how the job is really done surfaces things no interview will. On-site days are quoted separately by duration. English is the working language.
A quarter of an engineer is SEK 46,000 a month, invoiced in kronor, with nothing added on top and nothing to unwind if you stop. Tell us the process that costs your team the most — we will say honestly whether it is worth automating and which fraction to start with.
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