Updated July 2025
Some ask why are we not giving services and products for free, as after all, email is free
If you're receiving a service for free, in general it is fair to say that you are the product.
Many will remember email being free as early as Hotmail, Freeserve and Google Mail. I think we all know now that this was never free, rather at the price of the big tech giants reading our email, harvesting (what is now their data) and selling this on the anyone with the funds to buy it, for whatever purposes they can think of.
More recently we are aware of how AI models are trained on this data. Everything that can be harvested online, in particular that which we have given license to as soon as we agreed to the terms and conditions for access to these so called free services.
At AJBC we don't do that. We need to pay for servers, bandwidth, storage and our time, so believe it is only fair to charge for our products and services.
We have an hourly rate of GBP 80.00 for one off pieces of work.
If you need us to visit you onsite, our charge is for a day and any costs incurred getting there.
If you are contracting our work for a period of time and in a repeated way, we would be pleased to come to an agreement and offer a reduced overall rate.
If you're a not for profit or charity and have tight budgetary constraints we can come to an arrangement over charges and expenses. However, we all still need to be sustainable over time.
So if you fall into the latter category, even if you're a start up strapped for cash, we want to talk - particularly if your venture aligns with our core values.
We know what it is like to be there.
Technology is blamed for many things, one of which is over consumption of power and resources. We believe in efficiencies of our time and energy. This is in both personal and computing resource. Choosing the right tool for the job can mean profit or loss. Moreover it can contribute to saving the planet. Energy efficient solutions use less to do more. We believe that this is a design pattern that all can use to save ourselves from over consumption.
We learned from the kindness of others who early on chose to share their knowledge and contribution, and with that, the intention that we did likewise. If a person can be shown how to do a thing, like in fishing, they can do that for themselves, share their self sustenance with others and help them too to attain to a level of independence and autonomy. If we create a tool or service that we ourselves use to become more efficient, we pass that on by making it available for others also to remove overwhelm from their lives also.
Your content, your words, ideas, comments, are yours and yours alone. They are not the product for others to gain benefit from having taken your intellectual property and ownership. Taking control of your data is not possible if someone or something has already taken it someplace else and where you cannot move it, change or remove it when you decide to do so. We do not sell your data to the highest bidder and you can take control over your data and can take responsibility for it. Indeed we believe that is both a right and a requirement for you to do so.