We turn down more work than we take.
That sentence costs us enquiries, and we publish it anyway — because a firm that will take anything cannot afford to say it, and because you deserve to know the criteria before you spend an hour writing to us.
The actual criteria
- Demand is already validated. A signed pilot, a waiting list, an operator willing to trial, a workflow your staff already run by hand. We are not the right people to find out whether anyone wants it.
- You hold the domain and we hold the engineering. The best work we have done came from a client who understood their market far better than we ever would.
- The outcome turns on judgement we actually have. If the hard part is something we have done before, you are buying years rather than hours.
- There is a real route to commercial operation. Someone will pay, there is a way to charge them, and nothing legal or structural quietly prevents it.
- The commercial shape works for both sides. An arrangement that only one party can live with does not survive the first difficult month.
- The brief is capacity by the hour. Staff augmentation is a real service and a reasonable thing to buy. It is not what we do, and we are expensive at it.
- The scope ends at a demonstration. If nothing after the demo is defined, we are the wrong spend — a cheaper team will produce the same video.
- The domain is outside our competence. We would be learning at your expense and charging you for the privilege.
- The timeline is set by something other than the work. A board meeting is not an engineering constraint, and pretending otherwise fails slowly and expensively.
- The jurisdiction or sector creates exposure we cannot responsibly carry. Sometimes the honest answer is that this needs a specialist and a lawyer before it needs a developer.
If you read the right-hand column and recognised your project, write to us anyway. We will tell you what we think in the first reply and, where we can, name someone better suited. That is a faster and cheaper answer than a proposal.
What it is actually like.
You talk to the people building it. There is no account manager between you and the work. The person who designs the system is in the conversation where the decision gets made.
You see working software, weekly. Not a status report describing working software. Something you can open.
We tell you when we are wrong. Early, in writing, with what it means for time and cost. Bad news does not improve with age, and a partner who only ever reports green is not telling you the truth.
Decisions get written down. Every architectural choice of consequence is recorded with its reasoning, so that in eighteen months nobody has to guess why the system is the way it is — including us.
You can leave. The IP, the accounts and the documentation are yours throughout. We would rather you stay because the work is good than because leaving is difficult.
Most of the value is decided in conversations like this one, long before any code.
How engagements are usually structured.
We do not publish rates, because a rate without a scope is a number that misleads both of us. We are happy to be specific very early in a conversation.
What we can tell you now is the shape:
- The framing stage is a fixed price. Small, self-contained, and yours to keep whatever you decide afterwards.
- Build work runs in monthly periods against an agreed direction, invoiced monthly, with a written record of what shipped.
- Operating a live product is a separate, ongoing arrangement — never bundled into a build price where it would be invisible.
- Occasionally we go in on revenue share where we genuinely believe in the product and the structure is fair to both sides. Occasionally, not routinely.
- IP is yours, permanently — written into the contract, not implied by goodwill.
We would rather have five clients we are actually useful to than twenty we are merely adequate for.