AI services for UK small businesses
Every AI service we offer, and the order to buy them in
Nine connected AI services covering the whole journey from a customer trying to reach you to the invoice going out. You do not need all of them. This page exists to help you work out which one you need first.
From £24.99/moplus VAT. Every price on this site is published, including the ones that make us look expensive.
Manchester based, UK wide. Company 13356970. Every service here runs inside our own business first.
Why most AI services get bought in the wrong order
The usual sequence is that somebody reads about a chatbot, buys a chatbot, and nothing measurable changes. Not because chatbots are bad, but because the leak was somewhere else entirely.
- A business buys website chat while its phone still rings out at lunchtime.
- Another automates invoicing while quotes go unanswered for a fortnight.
- A third builds a beautiful new site that nobody follows up the enquiries from.
- Somebody spends four figures on a tool that solves a problem they did not have.
- Two systems get bought from two suppliers and neither talks to the other.
- And in every case the honest verdict a year later is "it did not really do much".
The technology was rarely the problem. The order was. AI services compound when they are bought in sequence and cancel out when they are bought at random.
What counts as an AI service, and what is just software
The label has been stuck on everything from a spell checker to a call centre. Worth being precise, because you are about to spend money against it.
An AI service, in the sense that matters to a small business, is software that handles something previously requiring a person to read, listen or decide, and that is managed by somebody who will fix it when it breaks. Both halves matter. The first half is the capability. The second half is the difference between a service and a subscription you configured once and forgot.
Plenty of genuinely useful automation involves no AI at all. A rule that copies a form submission into a spreadsheet is plumbing, and plumbing is often enough. We say so on the business automation page and we will say it to your face during a review. The AI part earns its place specifically when the input is messy: a badly worded email, a phone call, six suppliers with six different invoice layouts.
The managed part is what most buyers underrate. Anything connected to a live phone line, inbox or website will eventually break, usually because a third party changed something without telling anybody. A service includes somebody noticing that and fixing it. A subscription includes a login and your own free time.
Managed, not just supplied
The distinction shows up on the day something goes wrong. If a supplier changes a field name and your automation stops, a managed service means logging, an alert, and somebody who already knows how your workflow was built. An unmanaged tool means you find out from a customer.
That is why every price on this site includes a monthly element rather than being a one-off build fee. We are not selling you a project. We are agreeing to keep something working.
One platform underneath, not nine separate tools
Each service below is a door into the same connected system, which is the part that actually produces the compounding. A call answered by the receptionist creates the same kind of lead record as a website form, moves through the same follow-up, becomes the same job and the same invoice.
Buying the same nine capabilities from nine suppliers gets you nine dashboards and no joined-up picture. How the pieces fit is set out on the platform page.
The nine AI services, grouped by what they fix
Capture, follow up, deliver, grow, foundations. Start with the group where you are losing the most.
AI Receptionist
Answers your phone when nobody can, takes the job details properly, checks the postcode and flags emergencies. Usually the highest-return service we sell, because the alternative is voicemail.
AI receptionist, from £99 a monthAI Website Chat
Answers questions on your website at nine in the evening using your real pricing and policies, and turns the conversation into an enquiry rather than a transcript nobody reads.
AI website chat, from £69 a monthLead Capture and Follow-up
Every enquiry from every channel in one list with an owner and a next step, plus the polite chasing that wins the work everybody else lets go quiet.
Lead capture, from £39 a monthQuote and Job Management
Accepted quotes becoming scheduled jobs, written approvals, progress the customer can see, and invoices raised without anybody retyping anything.
Quote and job management, from £149 a monthBusiness Process Automation
The repetitive admin nobody was hired to do: invoices read off PDFs, records moved between systems, reports that build themselves. Discovery £249.
Business automation, from £500AI Consultancy
Advice, rules and implementation planning before anybody builds anything, from a company that runs all of the above in its own operation.
AI consultancy, sessions from £149Connected Websites
A website built to produce enquiries and feed them into the system above, rather than to sit there describing you to nobody.
Connected websites, from £795Managed Hosting and Email
Somebody accountable for the foundations: hosting, business email, backups, certificates and the unglamorous things that only get noticed when they fail.
Managed hosting, from £24.99 a monthContent and Campaigns
AI-assisted, human-approved marketing that sounds like you wrote it, aimed at the list you already own rather than strangers.
Content and campaigns, from £99 a monthWhy we can say this with a straight face
We built all nine for ourselves before selling any of them
Manchester PC is a computer repair and services business. That is not a heritage detail, it is the reason this list exists in this order. Every service above was built because something in our own week was leaking money, and we had the unusual advantage of being able to build software rather than only buy more of it.
The order on this page is our order. We fixed the phone first, because we could measure the calls we were missing and they were the most expensive thing happening to us. Then follow-up, because we rang nineteen quiet quotes one afternoon out of curiosity and won precisely none of them. Then the job workflow, then the admin around it, then the marketing. Nobody planned that sequence in advance. It emerged because at each point it was the biggest remaining hole.
That is also why we are comfortable telling businesses not to buy things. We know what each of these did and did not change for us, which is a different kind of knowledge from reading a vendor case study. When we say website chat rarely fixes a business whose phone rings out, it is because we tried the pieces in various orders and watched what happened.
And all nine still run here today. When you ring us and everybody is busy, you meet the receptionist. The quote you get is assembled by the quoting workflow. The invoice comes out of the job. We are not demonstrating a product, we are running a company on it.
The order on this page is our order. It emerged because at each point it was the biggest remaining hole.
Read the whole storyThe order we would buy them in
Five steps, each one earning its keep before the next is worth adding. Most businesses never need to get past step three.
- 01
Stop losing the enquiries
Answer the phone when you cannot, and catch the website enquiries that arrive out of hours. Nothing else you buy matters if the enquiries never arrive.
AI receptionist - 02
Follow up what you caught
A single list with an owner and a next step, and polite automatic chasing. This is where most businesses find the money they did not know they were leaving.
Lead capture and follow-up - 03
Turn accepted work into finished work
Quotes into jobs, approvals in writing, customers told what is happening, invoices raised from the job.
Quote and job management - 04
Remove the admin around it
Once the flow works, automate the retyping that surrounds it. Doing this earlier just makes a messy process faster.
Business automation - 05
Then go and get more
Only once you can reliably catch, follow up and deliver is it sensible to spend on generating more demand.
Content and campaigns
Which AI service fixes which problem
The quickest way to find your starting point is to find your symptom in the left column.
| If this is happening | The service that fixes it | From |
|---|---|---|
| Calls ring out while you are working | AI Receptionist | £99/mo |
| Website enquiries arrive at night and go cold | AI Website Chat | £69/mo |
| Enquiries land in four places and get lost | Lead Capture and Follow-up | £39/mo |
| Quotes go quiet and nobody chases them | Lead Capture and Follow-up | £39/mo |
| Accepted work is tracked in someone's head | Quote and Job Management | £149/mo |
| The same data gets typed into two systems | Business Process Automation | £500 build |
| Nobody knows where to start with AI | AI Consultancy or the Assessment | £99 |
| The website does not produce enquiries | Connected Websites | £795 |
| Hosting and email are nobody's job | Managed Hosting and Email | £24.99/mo |
If more than three of these are true, do not buy three services. Book a review and we will tell you which single one moves the most.
What our AI services do not include
A services page that only lists what you get is a brochure. These are the limits, stated before you pay rather than after.
Anything that runs unsupervised where being wrong is expensive
We do not build systems that pay invoices, commit to prices or send contractual documents on their own. Those get prepared automatically and approved by a person. The time saved by removing the approval is minutes, and the cost of one confidently wrong decision is not.
This is a genuine constraint rather than a marketing line. If your requirement is a fully autonomous system making commercial decisions, we are the wrong supplier and we will say so in the first call.
Unlimited changes
Monthly fees cover running, monitoring and fixing what we built. Substantial new work is quoted separately. Suppliers who promise unlimited changes either price that risk into the monthly fee or become slow to answer, and both are worse than an honest boundary.
Replacing your team
In a business of this size that is almost never what happens, and it is not what we sell. What these services remove is the part of the job nobody wanted: the retyping, the chasing, the checking. In practice it postpones a hire rather than replacing a person.
Data migration and third-party fees
Moving history out of an old system is scoped separately because its cost depends entirely on the state of the old data, which nobody can know in advance. Telephony minutes, domain fees and third-party licences are passed through at cost rather than marked up.
All prices plus VAT, with reasonable usage limits. Setup fees, where they apply, are stated on each service page and on the pricing page rather than discovered later.
How to choose an AI services company
Including the questions that would be awkward for us if the answers were different. Ask them of any supplier, us included.
Ask what they run in their own business. It is the single most revealing question available and very few suppliers answer it well. A company selling AI receptionists whose own phone goes to voicemail has told you what it thinks of its product. Everything on this page answers our phone, sorts our inbox and quotes our repairs today.
Ask whether the advice and the build are priced separately. If a supplier only makes money when you buy the implementation, their recommendation cannot be neutral, however honest they personally are. We price advisory work on its own so that "do nothing yet" stays a commercially survivable thing for us to tell you.
Ask what happens if you leave. You should own your data, your configuration and your documentation, and be able to take them elsewhere including the awkward parts. A supplier who makes their work deliberately hard to hand over is telling you something about how they expect to keep your business.
Ask where the human stays in the loop
For every AI service, there should be a clear answer to "what does the machine decide alone, what needs approval, and what always goes to a person". If a supplier cannot draw that line on a napkin, they have not thought about it, and it is the line that decides whether the system is an asset or a liability.
Ask about the boring failure cases
What happens when the caller has a strong accent, when a supplier changes their invoice layout, when someone asks a question the system does not know. Good suppliers answer these immediately because they have hit all three. Vague answers mean the product has only ever been demonstrated, not run.
Ask who is accountable for data protection
Call recordings, transcripts and customer records are personal data, and the duty sits with your business regardless of who supplied the software. Any serious supplier will tell you what is processed, where and for how long, without hesitating. The ICO guidance on AI and data protection sets out what you need to be able to explain.
What the AI services cost together
All prices plus VAT, month to month. These are the common combinations rather than a full list, which lives on the pricing page.
Catch
£99 setup£99/mo
Stopping the enquiries you are currently losing
- AI receptionist, 100 minutes a month
- Details captured properly, every call
- Emergencies flagged and routed
- Email summary of every call
- Live in days rather than weeks
Catch and follow up
£699 setup£149/mo
The combination most small businesses actually need
- Everything in Catch, plus the pipeline
- Website form and chat into one list
- Automatic quote follow-ups
- Conversion and source reporting
- Five users
The connected operation
From £1,500 setup£249/mo
Running enquiries, quotes, jobs and invoicing in one place
- Quote to job to invoice, no retyping
- Written approvals against every job
- Customer-visible progress
- Automation of the surrounding admin
- Reporting across the whole journey
Not sure which line you are on? The £99 AI Opportunity Assessment measures it properly, and it regularly recommends the cheaper option.
Frequently asked questions
What AI services do you actually offer?
Nine: AI receptionist, AI website chat, lead capture and follow-up, quote and job management, business process automation, AI consultancy, connected websites, managed hosting and email, and content and campaigns. They share one platform, so buying two connected services is worth more than buying two separate tools.
Do I have to buy all of them?
No, and we would talk you out of it. Most businesses start with one, add a second when the first has proved itself, and never need the rest. The order on this page is the order we would recommend, and step three is where most people stop.
How much do AI services cost for a small business?
On this site, from £24.99 a month for managed hosting up to around £249 a month for a full connected workflow, plus VAT, with setup fees stated on each service page. Automation builds start at £500. Every price is published rather than quote-only.
Are these AI services suitable for a one-person business?
Often the most suitable, because there is genuinely nobody else to answer the phone or chase a quote. Sole traders usually see the biggest proportional gain from the first service and should ignore the rest until it has paid for itself.
Can you work alongside our existing IT provider or software?
Yes, and we often do. Most of what we build connects tools you already pay for. We would rather add capture in front of a system that works than sell you a migration you did not need.
How long does it take to get an AI service running?
Call answering and website chat are days. The lead pipeline is one to two weeks. A full connected workflow is four to six, most of which is agreeing how your business actually works rather than building anything.
What happens to our data?
It sits in your own space rather than pooled with other clients, and you own it. Nothing sensitive goes into public AI tools, and what any AI step can see is agreed at setup in line with ICO guidance. If you leave, you take the data, the configuration and the documentation.
Do you offer AI services outside Manchester?
Yes. We are Manchester based and work UK wide, and most of the setup happens remotely. Being local matters because we can come to your premises to map a process properly, which is why we publish a separate page for AI services in Manchester.
Every service page in full
The complete detail behind each of the nine, plus the pages that help you choose between them.
- AI receptionistCalls answered, qualified and captured while you work. From £99 a month.
- AI website chatWebsite questions answered out of hours and turned into leads. From £69 a month.
- Lead capture and follow-upOne list, one owner, one next step, and the chasing done for you. From £39 a month.
- Quote and job managementAccepted quotes becoming scheduled, evidenced, invoiced work. From £149 a month.
- Business process automationThe repetitive admin connected and removed. Discovery £249, builds from £500.
- AI consultancyAdvice, rules and planning before anything is built. Sessions from £149.
- Connected websitesA site built to produce enquiries, not just to exist. From £795.
- Managed hosting and emailSomebody accountable for the foundations. From £24.99 a month.
- Content and campaignsAI-assisted, human-approved marketing to the list you already own.
- AI Opportunity AssessmentWhere AI would genuinely pay in your business, ranked. Founding price £99.
- All prices in one placeEvery service, every price, organised by the problem it solves.
- AI services in ManchesterThe local version, with on-site process mapping across Greater Manchester.
Start with the one that is costing you most
Book a free systems review and we will go through where enquiries arrive, what happens to them, and which single service would return the most. If the honest answer is that you do not need any of them yet, we will say that instead.
All prices plus VAT. Month to month, no minimum term.