About
We are small on purpose.
Between an automation subscription and a Big 4 scoping engagement there is a wide gap. Most Australian businesses of ten to two hundred people sit in it.
01 · Why we exist
The gap we work in.
There are two ordinary ways to buy AI in Australia, and they sit a long way apart.
At one end are automation agencies running managed workflows on a subscription. Entry tiers here start at about A$110 a week. aiautomationagency.com.au ↗ That is a real service, and for plenty of businesses it is the right purchase. At that price nobody is reading the fine print on where your customer data gets processed. Nobody is standing behind the system the week it quotes a job wrong either.
At the other end are the large firms. A Big 4 AI scoping engagement is publicly benchmarked in Australia at A$120,000 to A$400,000, before a line of code is written. sandlabs.com.au ↗ Capable people do that work. It is also more than most businesses of this size will ever spend to find out what to build.
So the middle does nothing, for years. That is the gap. Our diagnostic is A$4,500 excluding GST and takes two weeks, and it ends with a written recommendation and a fixed price for the top item. Sometimes the recommendation is to build nothing, which is the cheapest thing we can hand you.
02 · Size
Being small is the offer.
The people who scope your work are the people who build it. There is no account manager, no bench, and nobody more senior you never meet. Ring the number on this site and you get one of them.
The difference is structural. New South Wales publishes the staffing shape it expects from consultancies on its ICT panel: Partner 6%, Director 6%, Senior Manager 6%, Manager 20%, Senior Consultant 19%, Consultant 24%, Analyst 19%. buy.nsw.gov.au ↗ Sixty-two per cent of billed days sit at Manager level and below. None of that is a criticism. It is arithmetic. A firm with hundreds of staff has to keep them busy, and a pyramid is how you do that.
The trade runs both ways, so here is the cost to you. A large firm can put twenty people on your problem next Monday and we cannot. If that is what the job needs, hire them.
Small firms carry an obvious risk, so we write the answer into every engagement. The code sits in your repository. The credentials sit in your accounts. The procedures are written down, in English, so somebody else could pick the work up.
03 · What we believe
Five things we believe about this work.
Most businesses should automate one thing, not ten.
Ten small automations scattered across a business are ten things to maintain, and nobody can tell you what any of them saved. One workflow, done properly and measured, is worth more than a shelf of half-finished ones. It is also a much smaller invoice, which is the part that costs us.
If we cannot measure it, we will not claim it.
People are poor judges of their own speed. Sixteen experienced developers were 19% slower on real tasks using AI tools, and finished the trial believing they had been 20% faster. metr.org ↗ So we count instead, before and after, on the same measure. If the number does not move we have to say so.
If the honest answer is "do not build this", you get it in writing.
That answer arrives at the end of the diagnostic, in the report, in plain words. It kills the build fee that would have followed. We would rather lose the job than sell you the wrong one and spend six months defending it.
Prices belong on the website.
Ours are published, which means we cannot quietly price a job by how much we think you can pay. It also means anyone can undercut us on Tuesday. We think the trade is worth it, because you should be able to work out whether to call us without calling us.
What we build is yours to walk away with.
Your repository, your accounts, your keys, and written procedures for every workflow. The monthly retainer is optional and you can end it on 30 days' notice. Nothing we build is designed to be hard to leave.
04 · Where we are
Sydney, and the name.
We are based in Sydney, New South Wales. Australian owned and Australian run, working with businesses anywhere in the country. The number on this site is a Sydney number. If the work needs us in your office, we come to your office.
The name is a plant. Westringia fruticosa is coastal rosemary, which holds ground in poor soil, salt and wind. Lomandra longifolia, which our product is named after, gets planted to stop banks eroding. Both are Australian natives. That is the whole story.
05 · The people
The people you would be working with.
This page does not name us yet. It will, with real names, real roles and real photographs. You should know who is going to be sitting in your office for two weeks. Until that is written, we would rather leave the section empty than fill it with job titles.
The contact details already reach a person. Call 02 8531 8610 or email hello@westringia.com. Neither goes to a switchboard, a queue or a chatbot. Ask who you would be working with and we will tell you before you commit to anything.
Tell us what's slow.
Describe the part of your week that takes too long. You will get a reply from a person, usually the same day.
Or email hello@westringia.com directly.