01
Assessment
Engineering assessment · paid
Two weeks. A fixed fee. A written report you keep, whoever ends up doing the work.
We go in, find out what you have, and write down what it will cost to fix, replace, or leave alone. You get the document either way.
02
Who it is for
Who it is for.
Four situations, one piece of work. Pick whichever describes you, and the assessment answers the question paired with it.
Your provider walked away
What do you actually have, and what will it cost to keep it alive?
Your system is slow, fragile, or expensive
Why is this so expensive to change, and what is the cheapest way out?
You are wondering whether agentic automation is worth it
Where in your process does it actually pay, and where would ordinary software be cheaper?
You are considering building something
Is this the right thing to build, and what does it really cost?
If none of them fit, the free health check is the better starting point.
03
The work
What the two weeks look like.
Days 1 to 4
Discovery
We look at what exists. The systems, the hosting, the repositories, the data, the access, the integrations, and the people who still know something. We talk to whoever has context, including the ones who are not technical, because the undocumented rules usually live with them.
Days 5 to 8
Analysis
What will break and when. What is driving the cost. Where the key-person risk sits. What the realistic options are and what each one actually costs, including the option of changing nothing.
Days 9 to 10
The report and a walkthrough
Written up, sent to you, and then talked through so you can ask questions of a person rather than of a PDF.
We keep it short on purpose. A hundred-page document is a way of hiding a thin recommendation inside a thick artefact.
04
The report
What is in the report.
A documented map of your systems
What runs where, in whose account, holding what data, depending on what.
A risk register
What will break, roughly when, and what it costs when it does.
Costed options
The trade-offs stated for each. Not one recommendation dressed as inevitability.
A recommended sequence
What to do first, and what can wait without getting worse.
Everything in writing
In language you can take to a board, with the technical detail in an appendix for whoever needs it. Yours to take anywhere.
05
The fee
What it costs.
R40 000, excluding VAT. Fixed.
Two weeks (ten working days)
Up to three systems, with their hosting, data stores, repositories, pipelines, and access model, plus interviews with whoever holds the context. More systems, more than one cloud tenant, or code we cannot get read access to, and the price changes.
Credited in full against your first invoice if you engage us for delivery work within 90 days of the report. If you do not, the report is still yours and nothing further is owed.
One fee, agreed before we start. If what we find changes the scope, we tell you before we do the work rather than after.
06
The limits
The limits.
What an assessment is not, so you can tell whether it is what you need.
Not a sales document with a report’s cover on it
The recommendation is allowed to be do nothing, and sometimes is.
Not conditional on hiring us afterwards
You can hand the report to another firm and brief them with it. That is a legitimate use of it and we would rather you did that than proceed with us reluctantly.
Not a full code audit
We read enough of the code to judge its shape, its dependencies, its test coverage, and where the risky parts sit. A line-by-line review is a separate piece of work with its own fee.
Not a penetration test or a formal security certification
We will flag what we see, and we will tell you when you need a specialist rather than pretending to be one.
Not a guarantee
It is an informed reading of your systems by people who have built and inherited a fair number of them, written down so you can challenge it.
07
Who delivers it
Who delivers it.
Named people, not a resourcing pool. You know before you book who will be in the room and who writes the report.
Ruben Coetzee
Chief Technology Officer
Owns technical direction, and does the inheriting: working out what is actually wrong with a codebase somebody else wrote. He leads the assessment.
Wihann Engelbrecht
Team Lead
Closest to how delivery work runs day to day. He turns what the assessment finds into a sequence somebody can execute.
08
Objections
Questions we get.
Who owns the report and what is in it?
You do. It is yours to keep, act on, and hand to somebody else. We treat it as confidential on our side and we will sign your NDA if you would rather have that in writing.
Can you do this under an NDA?
Yes. Send us yours or use ours.
We have no documentation. Is that a problem?
No. That is frequently the finding.
Our previous provider will not hand over access.
Common. We will tell you what can be established without them, from the running system, the DNS records, the billing accounts, and your own people. We will also tell you what genuinely requires their cooperation, so you know what is worth fighting for.
What if the answer is rebuild?
Then you get that in writing with the reasoning, the sequence, and the cost of running both systems during the transition. We will not recommend a rebuild without an argument attached, and our starting position is that most systems do not need one.
What if the answer is that we do not need you?
You get that in writing too, and it costs the same.
How is this different from the free health check?
The health check is us reading your answers. The assessment is us looking at your systems.
09
Next step
Book an assessment.
Tell us what you have and what is worrying you. We will come back with a date, a scope and a fee before anyone commits to anything.
Claer & Volker
453 Winifred Yell St, Garsfontein
Pretoria, South Africa
info@claervolker.com
© 2026 Claer & Volker
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