IT Consulting

How to Choose an Independent IT Consultant?

You can recognize an independent IT consultant by one thing: they make money solely from advice — not from selling licenses, implementations or their own team's hours. Before you sign a contract, check three things: the billing model, experience with similar decisions, and whether they sometimes advise against their own services when the conversation makes clear these would not deliver real value.

AuthorMarcin KamińskiPublished4 min read

Why independence matters

Most "IT advisory" on the Polish market is really pre-sales: the audit is free or cheap because the real margin is hidden in the implementation the audit is meant to justify. For a board this obviously means recommendations that cannot be separated from the interests of the person making them.

An independent consultant reverses that arrangement: their only product is a recommendation that serves the client's interests — with the reasoning, a plan and selection criteria. An independent consultant has no reason to inflate the scope, because they are not selling the next stage.

Checklist: 5 questions before you sign

  1. How do they make their money? Ask about their revenue structure. If more than half comes from implementations or license resale, the recommendations will gravitate toward their own services.
  2. Do they have vendor partnerships? Partner status (license commissions, sales thresholds) is a formal conflict of interest — it should be disclosed in the contract.
  3. Does the engagement have a defined end? A decision review should close within a set time frame (e.g. 2–4 weeks) and end with something concrete, not an open-ended retainer. From the very first conversations, the goals and the proposed way of reaching them should start to take shape.
  4. Who will actually do the work? A senior consultant is often the face of the pitch while a junior does the actual work. Ask directly about the people and their experience.
  5. Do they ever turn down engagements? A consultant who says "yes" to everyone is not being selective — they are selling.

Warning signs

  • A free audit "with no strings attached" — someone is paying for it; usually the cost is hidden in a future implementation.
  • A recommendation appears at the first meeting, before any diagnosis.
  • Refusal to sign a zero-commission clause covering vendors.
  • Pricing offered only as time and materials, with no defined outcome. Time and materials is the most common billing model and is not a concern in itself, since it follows directly from the nature of the work. But if no expected outcome is defined alongside it, make sure one is.

What it costs and how long it takes

A typical decision review for an SMB involves the equivalent of roughly 2–4 weeks of billed time. The elapsed time can of course be longer, depending on the pace on both sides. On the Polish market, rates for independent IT consultants start at around PLN 200/h (roughly €47/h), and fixed advisory packages typically fall between roughly PLN 15,000 and PLN 60,000 (about €3,500–14,000) — still an order of magnitude less than the cost of a wrong platform decision, which in an ecommerce migration can exceed PLN 500k (over €115,000). For a smaller organization with simpler challenges and a goal that is well defined early on, an advisory package can be considerably cheaper.

What a good first conversation looks like

A short first meeting is usually exploratory — not least because at that stage an NDA is rarely in place. Its goal is to understand the challenges the organization is facing and to confirm there is room to work together. The outcome of such a conversation should be an initial assessment of the situation and a proposed first step, or an outline of how the work would proceed. Both sides also get a natural opportunity to share their experience and build the trust needed to start working together — that, to us, is how independent IT consulting should begin.

Frequently asked questions about choosing an IT consultant

An integrator makes money from the implementation and the licenses, so their advice steers you toward their own services. An independent consultant makes money solely from advice — the recommendation can point to any vendor, or to a solution that requires buying nothing at all.

Hourly rates start at around PLN 200 (roughly €47). Fixed advisory packages (decision review, architecture audit, cloud cost control) typically fall between roughly PLN 15,000 and PLN 60,000 (about €3,500–14,000) for the equivalent of 2–4 weeks of billed time — the elapsed time can be longer. For a smaller organization with a well-defined goal, a package can be considerably cheaper.

Three signals: the audit is free or symbolic, a recommendation appears before any diagnosis, and the advisor refuses to sign a zero-commission clause covering the vendors they recommend.

Company size matters less than the stakes of the decision. If the choice of platform, cloud costs or vendor lock-in translates into hundreds of thousands of PLN over a few years, an independent assessment before the decision pays for itself many times over. A limited budget should not stop you from reaching out — it is worth saying so openly, and the consultant can adjust the model and scope of work to the organization's needs at that stage of its growth.

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