Questions we get before the first call.

We quote per engagement rather than publishing a day rate, because the same amount of calendar time means very different things on a greenfield API and on a fifteen-year-old codebase. After the scoping call you get a written proposal with a fixed price for project work, or a monthly figure for embedded and retainer arrangements.

If a rough number would save us both time, say so on the first call and we will give you a range on the spot.

Project work is billed against milestones agreed in the proposal — typically an initial payment, one or more mid-project milestones, and a final payment on handover. Embedded and retainer work is billed monthly in arrears. Invoices are net 30 unless we agree otherwise in the contract.

For an embedded engineer, three months — below that, the ramp-up cost is not fair to either side. Project builds and technical audits have no minimum; the smallest useful audit is usually about a week. Maintenance retainers run month to month with 30 days' notice.

Scope changes are normal; surprises on the invoice are not. When something new comes up we price it as a written change order before any work starts on it, and you decide whether it goes in now, later, or not at all. Nothing gets built on a verbal "while you're in there".

You do, from the first commit. Work happens in your repository under your account. There is no escrow arrangement, no license to negotiate at the end of the project, and no part of the deliverable that stops working if you stop working with us.

That is most of what we do. We work inside your repository, your issue tracker and your review process, and we follow the conventions already in the codebase rather than reformatting it into ours. If your team has a strong opinion about how something should be done, that opinion wins.

We are remote-first and work across US and European hours, with a standing weekly call scheduled in your timezone. Day-to-day communication is asynchronous — issues, pull requests and written updates — so nobody has to be awake at an awkward hour to unblock the work.

Yes, and we prefer to sign a mutual NDA before the technical conversation starts, so you can describe the actual problem instead of an abstraction of it. We work under either your master services agreement or ours.

Named accounts issued by you, scoped to what the work requires, with multi-factor authentication and a written record of what was granted. We do not use shared logins. Production access is requested only when the task genuinely needs it, and we ask you to revoke every account at the end of the engagement — if you forget, we will remind you.

Tests are part of the price, not a line item you can decline to save budget. They are what makes the second month of a project cheaper than the first, and they are the reason your team can change the code after we leave.

Documentation covering how the system is structured and how to run it, runbooks for the operational tasks, the test suite, and a live walkthrough with the people who will own it. We stay available for 30 days after the last commit for questions and small fixes.

If you want us to, through a maintenance retainer — patching, dependency updates, monitoring and incident response. We would rather your own team owned it, and the handover is designed to make that possible, so a retainer is an option and never a condition.

Not as the main event. We build the APIs and data systems behind them, and we will build the admin panels and internal tools that go with our own work. For a consumer-facing web or mobile front-end, you want a specialist, and we are happy to work alongside one.

We will say so on the first call rather than three weeks into a proposal. Common reasons: the work is mostly front-end, the timeline needs a team we cannot staff, or the budget only works at rates we cannot match. Where we can, we point you toward someone better suited.