- Why is this so much cheaper than an agency?
- Because the cost structure is different, not the engineering. A traditional agency price carries account management, bench time, and a project team that rotates — you are paying for the org chart as well as the work. We price the work. The stack is also one we run in production for our own products, so the scaffolding every project needs — auth, subscriptions, CI, release automation, store submission — is not rebuilt from zero at your expense.
- What happens if you become unavailable?
- Continuity is designed in rather than promised. Source code and infrastructure live in your accounts from day one, not ours — you can revoke our access this afternoon and keep shipping. The pipeline is configuration in your repository, not knowledge in somebody's head: the build lanes, the OTA lane, the store submission and the monitoring are all committed, reviewable, and runnable without us. Retainers run month to month after the three-month minimum, either side can end with 30 days' notice, and ending one includes a documented handover rather than a cliff. No vendor of any size can honestly guarantee availability, so the question worth asking any of them is what you are left holding if it stops. Here it is everything.
- Is the price really fixed?
- Yes, against a written scope agreed before work starts. If you change the scope mid-build we price the change and you decide — you will never receive an invoice you did not agree to in advance. Genuinely open-ended problems are quoted at an hourly rate up front, rather than as a fixed price that quietly becomes one.
- How does payment work?
- Retainers are invoiced monthly in advance, on the same date each month, against a three-month minimum and rolling monthly after that. Fixed-scope builds are typically 50% to start and 50% on delivery, with larger builds split across milestones instead. Either way the exact structure is written into the scope document before any work begins.
- What does the three-month retainer minimum mean?
- It means the first three months are committed, because a release pipeline cannot be taken over and stabilised in four weeks — the first month is largely learning your systems, and cancelling at that point leaves you worse off than before. After month three it runs month to month and you can end it with 30 days' notice. No annual lock-in, no auto-escalating rate.
- What if a quiet month goes by and nothing breaks?
- That is the outcome you are paying for, and it is a fair question to ask before signing. A retainer buys ownership and availability, not a ticket quota: releases still ship, dependencies and OS versions still move underneath you, and monitoring still needs someone reading it. If genuinely quiet months repeat, the honest answer is to move you to the ad-hoc hourly rate rather than keep billing a retainer you have outgrown — we would rather lose the line item than have you resent it.
- Do I need a retainer or a fixed-scope build?
- A build if the thing does not exist yet and has a defined finish line. A retainer if it already ships and the cost is recurring — releases, CI breakage, store submissions, upgrades. Plenty of engagements start as a build and become a retainer at launch, which is the point at which the recurring work actually begins. If you are unsure, the discovery call is the cheapest way to find out, and a straight 'you do not need us monthly' is a normal outcome.
- What if we are not happy with the result?
- You get an installable build every week, so the first chance to say 'this is not what we wanted' is week one, not the end. That cadence exists specifically so a project cannot fail silently for two months. After launch, anything that shipped broken is fixed for two weeks at no cost.
- Do you work with AI-generated codebases?
- Frequently — it is one of the most common reasons people get in touch. Taking an app built in Lovable, Bolt, v0, or Cursor from 'the demo works' to production and App-Store-ready is scoped as a rescue rather than a rebuild, and usually costs less than starting over.
- Who owns the code?
- You do, outright, at handover — source and infrastructure in your own accounts. No license, no hosting lock-in, no per-seat fee afterwards.
Prices, timelines, and payment structures on this page are informational, and are fixed per project in a written scope. They are an invitation to start a conversation, not a binding offer — see the terms.