Twenty questions we are asked before every project

A small web application typically lands between $12,000 and $30,000; a full ERP or SaaS platform between $35,000 and $150,000. That range is wide because scope is, which is exactly why every engagement starts with a fixed-price discovery sprint — you leave it with a real estimate rather than a guess.

Discovery is always fixed-price. Build engagements are time-and-materials with a capped monthly rate, because fixed-price build contracts push both sides into arguing about scope instead of building the right thing. The cap means you always know your maximum exposure in a given month.

A cross-functional squad: engineers, design time, QA, DevOps and a project manager. Staging and CI infrastructure is included. Third-party costs you would pay anyway — cloud hosting, paid APIs, app store fees — are billed at cost with no markup.

No. The two things clients are sometimes surprised by are third-party service fees and the cost of changing scope substantially mid-build. We flag both explicitly: pass-through costs are itemised, and any change that moves the delivery date gets a written impact note before we start it.

Yes. Engagements committed for six months or more are discounted, and non-profit and education organisations get preferential rates. We would rather price for a long relationship than maximise the first invoice.

Usually two to three weeks for a full squad. A discovery sprint can often start within a week, since it needs fewer people. If we cannot staff you properly in a reasonable timeframe we will say so rather than start with whoever is free.

An MVP is 8–12 weeks. A mid-sized platform is 4–6 months. A full ERP replacement is 6–12 months, usually delivered in phases so value arrives before the end. You will have working software in front of users from week four either way.

You will know weeks in advance, not on the deadline. Every sprint ends with a demo and a written update including any slippage. Where a delay is our fault, we absorb it. Where it comes from a scope change or a dependency on your side, we say so at the time rather than at the end.

Yes, provided scope is allowed to flex. A fixed date and fixed scope with any uncertainty in it is how projects fail. We will help you decide what genuinely has to be in the first release and what can follow it.

A named project manager, a shared board you can see at any time, a written update every Friday, and a sprint demo every two weeks. Plus a shared Slack channel for the day-to-day. You should never have to ask where something is.

Yes — that is the point of working in sprints. You can reorder the backlog at any sprint boundary at no cost. Changes that increase total scope get an impact estimate before we commit to them, so the trade-off is explicit rather than discovered later.

Often, yes. We can run as an embedded squad in your process and repositories, or as a standalone team with a clean interface between us. We will also pair deliberately if part of the goal is to level up your own engineers.

One decision-maker who can settle questions within a day or two, access to the people who will actually use the software, and timely feedback on sprint demos. Projects that slow down almost always slow down on decisions, not on code.

Most clients move onto a support retainer covering patching, monitoring, incident response and a monthly allowance for small enhancements. If you would rather take it in-house, we do a structured handover instead — documentation, runbooks and two weeks of pairing.

On a standard retainer: four business hours for high priority, next business day for normal. On enterprise agreements: one hour for critical, 24/7. Median first response across all tickets last year was under two hours in business time.

Yes, after a short technical audit — typically three to five days — so we know what we are taking on. Sometimes that audit concludes the honest answer is a rebuild rather than a retainer, and we will tell you that even though it is the harder sale.

You do, from the first commit. Everything lives in your repositories and your cloud accounts. There is no licence to renew, no vendor lock and nothing you have to keep paying us for in order to keep running what we built.

You take everything: code, infrastructure, documentation, runbooks and credentials. We will do a handover to your team or your next agency, and we will do it properly. A bad exit is worse marketing than a lost contract.

Under an NDA and a data processing agreement. In practice: least-privilege access, no production data on developer machines, secrets in a managed vault, and access revoked the day an engagement ends. We are happy to work inside your own security controls where you have them.

Our processes are ISO 27001-aligned and we build to GDPR requirements by default. For HIPAA and PCI-DSS we build to the technical requirements and work alongside your compliance team or auditor — certification applies to your organisation and your deployment, so we will not claim to hand you one.