One of the first questions clients ask us is “what will this cost?” The honest answer is that it depends less on the feature list and more on the shape of the engagement. After delivering projects for clients in 12 countries, we’ve settled on three models — and learned which situations each one actually fits.
Fixed scope, fixed price
Best for: well-defined projects with a clear end state — a migration, an integration, an MVP with a settled feature set.
You get a price and a deadline up front, and the risk of estimation sits with us. The trade-off is rigidity: a fixed-price contract is only as good as the specification behind it, so we invest real time in scoping before we sign anything. If we can’t describe the finish line precisely, we’ll tell you — and recommend a different model instead of pretending.
Dedicated team, monthly
Best for: products that evolve — which is most products.
You get a stable team that learns your domain deeply and ships every week, with priorities you can re-decide as the market teaches you things. This is how most of our long-running client relationships work, including products that have grown to millions of users. It’s not an open-ended meter: you see what shipped every week, and you can scale the team up or down with notice.
Operation & care agreements
Best for: software that’s already live — built by us or by someone else.
A service agreement with defined response times covers monitoring, maintenance, security updates, and improvements. This is the model behind the numbers we’re proudest of: 99.8% uptime across the systems we operate and an average of four hours to resolve an issue. Stable software isn’t a launch-day property; it’s a maintenance discipline.
How to choose
A rule of thumb that has served our clients well:
- If you can write the acceptance criteria today, choose fixed price.
- If you expect to learn as you go, choose a dedicated team.
- If it’s already running and simply has to keep running, choose an operation agreement.
Many engagements move between models over their lifetime — a fixed-price MVP grows into a dedicated team, which eventually settles into an operation agreement. That arc is a healthy sign: it means the product made it.
Not sure which fits your situation? Describe your project and we’ll recommend one — including, when it’s true, “this is smaller than you think.”