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 sterling, and you can stop at the end of any month. UK clients can be hosted in the UK, so nothing has to leave the country to get this done.
Employer National Insurance went to 15% with the secondary threshold cut to £5,000, which means the on-cost now bites from almost the first pound of salary. Added to a market rate that has not softened, the in-house route is a bigger commitment than it was two years ago.
| What you pay for | Year one | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Base salary | £90,000 | A senior AI engineer, UK-wide average. London sits above £100,000 and the top quartile well beyond it. |
| Employer National Insurance | + £12,750 | 15% on earnings above the £5,000 secondary threshold, from 6 April 2026. |
| Pension auto-enrolment | + £2,700 | The 3% statutory employer minimum. Most employers competing for this role pay more. |
| Recruiter fee | + £18,000 | 20% of first-year salary — the standard contingency benchmark for a specialist permanent role. |
| Before they have shipped anything | £123,450 | And 4–9 months to recruit, then 1–3 more to ramp. |
£123,000 is the UK-wide figure. Hire in London and the salary line alone moves above £100,000, which takes the first year past £135,000. Neither number includes equipment, software, management time, or the cost of the role being wrong.
And the hire is only the second-hardest part. The hardest is that the person who can do this work — commercial judgement about where automation belongs, plus the engineering to build it — is genuinely scarce, and the companies that most need one are exactly the ones least able to attract them. A 400-person logistics business in the Midlands is bidding against London fintech for the same candidate.
A quarter of our engineer is £3,600 a month, starts next week, and ends whenever you say so. If the backlog turns out to be bigger than you thought, scale to a half or a full engineer next month; if it turns out to be smaller, scale down to £1,800 and keep what was built running. You own the code, the data and the documentation from day one.
Sources: salary from Glassdoor UK senior AI engineer data, June 2026 (£90,946 UK average, £101,481 London), rounded down; employer National Insurance rate and £5,000 secondary threshold from GOV.UK and HMRC guidance for 2026/27; pension auto-enrolment employer minimum 3%; recruiter fee at the 20% contingency benchmark reported for UK specialist permanent placement.
Quoted and invoiced in sterling. 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 the United Kingdom — 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 the United Kingdom 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.
UK hosting is available and is the usual choice here — we build inside environments you control, so your data can stay in the UK from the start and never sit under EU jurisdiction at all. The default elsewhere is the EU. You own the environment, the credentials and the data from day one, and your documents are never used to train anyone’s models. Note that UK GDPR obligations are yours as controller; we build to meet them and document accordingly.
Prefer the euro price, or based outside the United Kingdom? 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 £3,600 per month for a quarter of a senior AI and automation engineer — roughly five days of capacity a month. A half engineer is £6,750 and a full engineer £12,600 per month. Once the building is done and the work is mostly monitoring, the engagement scales down to £1,800 a month. Every tier is month-to-month and cancellable, and prices are quoted and invoiced in sterling rather than converted from euros at billing time.
In year one, clearly — an in-house senior AI engineer costs around £123,000 UK-wide and more like £135,000 in London once 15% employer National Insurance, pension auto-enrolment and a recruiter fee are added, and 4–9 months of that year goes on recruiting before anything ships. From year two a full-time hire doing genuinely full-time work is cheaper than our full-engineer tier, and we say so rather than pretending otherwise. The question is whether you have a full engineer’s worth of AI work every week, permanently.
Yes. The price on this page is the price on the invoice — we quote in GBP, invoice in GBP, and carry the exchange-rate risk ourselves rather than passing a conversion on to you. HelmUnit invoices from AzureVibes, s.r.o. in the Czech Republic, so as a UK business you receive an invoice with no Czech VAT and account for the tax locally.
Yes, and for UK clients that is normally what we do. We deploy into infrastructure you control, so your systems and data can sit in the UK throughout and never fall under EU jurisdiction. You own the environment, the credentials and the data from day one, and nothing is used to train anyone’s models.
Mostly, yes — listed rates cover remote delivery, and the building, testing and monitoring are all done just as well remotely. We do travel to the UK, and prefer to during the audit phase, because watching how the work really happens surfaces things no interview will. On-site days are quoted separately by duration.
No. IR35 governs an individual supplying their labour through an intermediary in circumstances that resemble employment. HelmUnit is a business-to-business service contract with AzureVibes, s.r.o., a Czech company, for a defined scope of work with our own tools, our own methods and multiple clients — not a disguised employment relationship, and not a personal service company. Your finance team will want to see the contract, and should.
A quarter of an engineer is £3,600 a month, starts next week, and stops on thirty days’ notice — no employer NI, no recruiter fee, no notice period to serve. Tell us the process that costs your team the most, and we will say honestly whether it is worth automating.
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