Balans
Balans is a project-based data and AI engineering practice for government and public institutions. We conceive and deliver modern, streamlined, accessible, and sovereign tooling without the overhead of long-term vendor contracts.
Choose Us If:
- You need a completed project, not another platform subscription.
- Your mandate has a deadline.
- Your resources don’t stretch to a multi-year vendor relationship.
- Your data can’t sit on infrastructure or architecture, you don’t control, or cannot audit.
On This Page:
Why Balans, Why Now?
Government modernization is usually sold as a platform: a subscription, a dashboard platform, a multi-year contract that outlives the mandate it was built for. Balans works differently — embedded, scoped, and finished for your scenario, your devices, your use-case.
We follow a forward-deployed model: an engineer working directly against your mandate, inside your constraints, until the deliverable is complete and handed over — not retained as an ongoing expenditure and dependency.
This approach is grounded in hands-on Government of Canada experience and graduate training in eGovernment — paired with modern, open-source data engineering practice. The result: solutions built with your conventions and standards accounted for.
Built For The Challenge Function (And The Future of Work)
- Local-first, sovereign by default. Data and models run on infrastructure you control. Nothing routes through third-party cloud services unless you choose it.
- No vendor lock-in. Deliverables are handed over complete — code, decisions, training materials — not licensed back to you.
- Project-based, not subscription-based. Defined scope, defined end date — built to fit standard contracting vehicles rather than requiring a new procurement category.
- Standards-compliant from day one. Built to WCAG 2.2 AAA and FAIR data principles, so outputs pass departmental review the first time.
What We Do
Data Engineering Custom pipelines, ETL, and infrastructure to turn raw data into actionable assets—always with sovereignty and scalability in mind.
AI/ML Engineering From proof-of-concept to production, we build and deploy models that solve real-world problems, with transparency and fairness at the core.
Data Strategy, Governance & Compliance Align your data with organizational goals, regulatory requirements, and best practices (e.g.: WCAG 2.2 AAA, FAIR).
Sovereign Tooling Local, in-process, on-device, inference and tooling by default — ensuring data sovereignty, privacy, and control.
Reporting & Analytical Deliverables Provide actionable insights through reports, notebooks, dashboards, and custom AI layers that draw on your project’s data and your team’s knowledge.
Services
Every engagement is scoped before it’s priced — the tiers below are for planning purposes, not a binding quote.
| Tier | Features | Typical timeline | Price range (CAD)* |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scope | Forensic data audit, FAIR assessment, scoping report | 4–6 weeks | $7,500 – $9,500 |
| Architect | Data cleaning, vault/lake structuring, pipeline development | 8–12 weeks | $35,000 – $80,000 |
| Enable | End-to-end build, SQL/reporting layer, local LLM integration, training materials | 12 weeks+ | $85,000 – $140,000 |
Final pricing depends on data volume, schema complexity, and current data quality — price ranges are confirmed with the purchase of a Scope tier service. Scope tier service required before any contract is signed for Architect and Enable tiers. Not every project will require all mentioned features.
About the name
Several cultures share the idea of something being “just right” (not too much, not too little). Like the Earth’s axial tilt, a small but well-placed adjustment can be what makes everything feel optimized, well-balanced. That’s the standard we hold ourselves to.
Contact
Have a project in mind, or just want to talk through your options first? Reach out — a first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.