Six months of service design and a WhatsApp prototype for a community hospital's home care service. The price is settled. The capacity question is not.
Why 88 and not more. In Singapore procurement, "ITQ" is a threshold word, not a generic one. The Ministry of Finance sets quotations at S$6,000 to S$90,000; above that you must run a tender. SACH is a charity and is not legally bound by that framework, but they titled the document an ITQ, set ninety-day price validity, and used government quotation template language. Going over an unknown ceiling loses the whole engagement. Staying under it costs a few thousand.
Why 88 and not less. A Singapore-employed consultant costs roughly S$840 a billable day loaded, so a local firm has to bill S$1,290 to S$1,530 to make normal margin. We are quoting below that. Our margin comes from the delivery team not being on Singapore payroll, not from the price being high. Cutting further buys nothing: MOF's own guidance says lowest quote does not win.
On paper it reads as consulting. In practice it is a product-led purchase wearing a consulting scope. Their submission section is headed "Proposed Solution and Product Information". They want a video of the working interface, a list of institutions already running the solution, annual licence pricing, warranty terms, and a five-year cost view.
So the competition is healthcare chatbot vendors, not design consultancies, and those vendors can loss-lead the prototype to win the licence annuity. Our answer is that we are the only shape of bidder who can credibly do both halves. A product vendor cannot run the discovery. A design consultancy has no product to show.
Implementation is explicitly excluded and goes to a separate agreement. We have quoted a production figure anyway — S$28,000 to S$36,000 a year, about S$150,000 over five years — so they can budget the path rather than guess at it.
Their requirement asks for institutions using a similar proposed solution. We keep two groups apart in the submission on purpose. Merging them to make the list look longer is how you get caught.
| Institution | What they run | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Klinik Selva | Clinic platform plus the patient WhatsApp assistant — booking, verified document retrieval, reminders | Confirm go-live |
| IHH / Parkway | Engagement platform, ACL outcome measures | In delivery |
| Qualitas Health | Engagement platform, GP / dental / eye | In delivery |
| St. John Ambulance of Malaysia | Ambulance dispatch and crew — a different product | Production |
| Uncle Kentang | Ambulance dispatch and crew — a different product | Production |
Klinik Selva is the closest working analogue we have, and whether we may call it production use turns on one fact nobody has confirmed. The ambulance clients still earn their place: St. John is a non-profit statutory body under its own Act of Parliament, exactly the institutional shape St. Andrew's Mission Hospital has, and Uncle Kentang transports bed-bound and end-of-life patients, which is SACH's home care caseload.
SACH phases run from a 1 November kickoff: deliverable 1 at week 10, prototype testable at week 20.
Discovery is the collision. It is stakeholder interviews and clinical workshops in Singapore, which is founder calendar time. Agents do not attend workshops, and it lands directly on top of Qualitas tranche 2. There is no engage code written yet, so the prototype half is only cheap if the platform actually lands before November.
The repo says zero production patients as of 31 August with go-live targeted for September, but the production deployment landed 28–31 August. This single answer sets our strongest reference and the caption on the demo video. We cannot claim production use unless it is true — they will call the referee.
Registry details, directors and shareholders, staff counts, three years of turnover and audited accounts, bankers, insurance position, and dates, values and contacts for all five client references. Nearly all of it is mandatory because their vendor declaration form demands it.
Load-bearing, not admin. If SACH applies a S$90,000 limit to a GST-inclusive figure and we are registered, the base has to drop to about S$82,500.
The Singapore versus Malaysia entity question is still open and should be settled before submission rather than after award. Separately, two of our three production clients are charities, so pick one approach to contract values and apply it to every row.
Klinik Selva, St. John Ambulance, Uncle Kentang, IHH and Qualitas. The last two warrant a conversation rather than an email — IHH is mid-security-review and Qualitas is an equity relationship.
Record the Klinik Selva WhatsApp assistant — booking, verified document retrieval, reminders. Their wording makes the video optional, but every product vendor bidding will have one. The org chart is required outright.
Someone needs protected weekly capacity from November to April to run the interviews, facilitate the clinical workshops and write deliverable 1. That is roughly forty-five to fifty days of work that cannot be delegated to agents and cannot be reused from IHH or Qualitas.
If that person does not exist when the award lands, the right move is to negotiate a later start, not to discount. There is less margin to absorb an overrun at S$88,000 than there would have been at S$98,000.
This is the go or no-go, not the price. Submitting costs us a few days of paperwork and keeps the option open. Signing without the lead is what would hurt.
anyhealth-engage/docs/sach/ — proposal, priced schedule, declaration form, fifteen clarifications, and the pricing rationale.TODO.md and reprinted by ./submission/build.sh on every run.