Brief & scoping
You write a few plain sentences. We read them carefully, ask better questions than you expect, and come back with a scope, a number, and an honest read — including whether you need less than you asked for, or nobody at all.
- Written scope
- Fixed price or rate
- Risk list
Architecture & plan
Before anyone writes production code we agree on the shape: data model, service boundaries, hosting, and the cost that comes with them. Defended in a room, written down, and yours regardless of what happens next.
- Architecture doc
- Data model
- Cost model
- Slice plan
Build in vertical slices
Each slice goes end to end — schema through UI — and lands in your environment behind a flag. You see working software every week, not a status percentage, and can change your mind while changing it is still cheap.
- Weekly deploys
- Flagged features
- Test suites
- Demo each Friday
Ship & harden
Load, security, observability, and the boring operational work that decides whether launch week is calm. Alerts that mean something, runbooks for the paths that break, and a rollback you have actually tested.
- Load test results
- SLOs and alerts
- Runbooks
- Rollback plan
Hand off — or stay on
We write documentation your team can act on and walk them through the system until they are comfortable owning it. If you would rather we stayed, we stay — but the handoff is built either way, so it is never the thing keeping us here.
- Architecture handbook
- Onboarding walkthroughs
- Optional retainer
Three shapes of engagement
Sprint
An audit, an architecture, or a spike that settles an argument. You leave with a document and a decision, not a dependency.
Build
Brief to production. The common shape: one senior team, weekly deploys, and a system your team owns at the end.
Partner
We stay on past handoff — feature work, on-call depth, or a standing architecture seat as the product grows.
What doesn’t change
Senior only
No junior bench leveraged against your budget. The person who scopes the work is the person who ships it.
Open source, by conviction
We build on tools we can read, fork, and own — so a vendor decision never becomes your dead end.
Cost is a design constraint
The bill is part of the architecture review, not a surprise in month three. We model it before we build it.
Asked every time
What if we already have a team?
Then we work alongside it. Most of our engagements are reinforcement rather than replacement — we take the slice nobody has bandwidth for, and we review code in your process, not ours.
Do you do fixed price?
For scoped work, yes — that is what week zero produces. For open-ended partnering, a rate is more honest than a number we would have to pad.
Who owns the code?
You do, from the first commit, in your repository. No escrow, no license, no per-seat anything.
What if it is not working out?
Either side can end an engagement on two weeks' notice. Everything built to that point is in your repo and documented — that is the point of shipping in slices.