A Number and a Date You Can Hold Us To — we carry the delivery risk
A fixed-price, fixed-scope build: we commit to price, scope, and timeline in the contract, build to our written standard, and hand over with a 3-month warranty. New builds and modernizations alike. And because senior engineers build it with AI on a codebase held to that standard, work once quoted in years now ships in months. If it runs over, that’s our cost.
What You Get
You end up owning everything: accounts, infrastructure, code, docs, plus training. It’s done when you can run it without us, not when it ships.
Incremental by default: staged cutovers, reversible steps, releases continuing throughout. We don’t pitch the clean-slate rewrite; when one’s right, the audit says so first.
Every feature ships with its tests in the fixed number, so regressions drop and stay down. (Escaped-defect rate is what we’re instrumenting across engagements, an intention, not yet a proven claim.)
Bugs are on us for three months after release, with scheduled check-ins. Our incentive to build it right survives the final invoice.
How the Risk Transfer Works
The fixed price moves the cost of being wrong from you to us, mechanically, not rhetorically. Here is the machinery.
A senior specialist, deliberately not the person who’ll build it, estimates per feature, then commercial overheads go on top explicitly, not as optimism: scope buffer, project management, QA, architect oversight, meetings. The committed price covers build, deployment, support, and warranty fixes. A fixed price is only honest if the estimate already paid for the whole lifecycle.
Scope, time, and budget go into the contract; from there, overruns are our cost. Payments follow the work, up to 25% upfront, monthly invoices, a final 10–20% only after handover, so we stay accountable to the end, not just the kickoff.
Fixed-length sprints, a demo each one, staging builds for your own testing, and a regular check-in on budget and scope, early warning on drift, shared rather than hidden. Your half: one decision-maker who can sign off at discovery and demos.
Material changes become new work orders, priced before the work starts, never discovered on an invoice. The committed price never quietly inflates. If scope changes weekly, team augmentation is the right tool, and it costs less.
When Not to Hire Us for This
Fixed scope can’t absorb constant churn. Every change becomes a work order. Team augmentation handles flux better and costs less.
If you want capacity to direct rather than an outcome to hold us to, that’s team augmentation. Pretending otherwise just costs more.
Fixed price needs someone who can scope, decide, and sign off. Without that, the contract protects no one, and we decline.
R&D and open-ended discovery don’t belong under a fixed price. Anyone who commits a number to an unknown is charging you for the padding. Start with an audit or paid discovery.
What It Costs
You pay more than the same build would on time-and-materials; that premium is the price of the risk sitting with us. In exchange: a number and a date you can plan around, and our incentive aligned with finishing, not billing.
Questions Buyers Actually Ask
How do you arrive at the fixed price?
Feature-by-feature estimation by a senior specialist who won’t be on the build, with commercial allowances added explicitly, not hidden in optimism. An estimate that skips part of the lifecycle isn’t cheaper, just dishonest earlier.
What happens when we change scope mid-project?
Changes become new work orders, priced before the work starts. Heavy ongoing change is a sign the project wants team augmentation instead.
What does the 3-month warranty cover?
Bugs, for three months after release. New features are scoped as new work, not a feature budget. Scheduled check-ins (weekly, then monthly) surface issues while we’re still watching.
Who owns the code, infrastructure, and IP?
You do, all of it, in your accounts and your name from the start, with documentation and training at handover. Leave-by-design: it’s done when you can run the system without us.
Is fixed price more expensive than time-and-materials?
Yes. The overrun risk has to live somewhere; here it lives with us, priced in. If you’re comfortable owning delivery yourself, team augmentation is cheaper and we’ll tell you so.
Do you do full rewrites?
We do them, and we don’t pitch them. Incremental is the default (big-bang rewrites are how revenue systems die), but when a rewrite is right, it’s now a months-scale, fixed-price project: a rebuild we committed at 7 months delivered at 7 months, as recorded at the time.
The Standard, and the Record
The estimation and handover discipline above is the project-management layer of the methodology, the standard the fixed price buys.
Read the methodology →Evolve Edits
downtime · per quarterDecade-old portal moving terabytes a month through one on-premise machine
- down from 125, a 90% drop 12 incidents
- upload throughput ~30 MB/s → uncapped
- infrastructure cost · per month $1,700 → $300 −80%
Consumer platform, sensitive data
fixed-price rebuildInvestor-promised B2B milestone blocked by the codebase
- fixed-price rebuild 7 months
- of the eventual engagement spend ~1%
Size It Before You Commit a Dollar — a call, then a path
Start with a short discovery call: we learn the goal and come back with approaches to weigh. Modernizing an existing system usually starts with the fixed-price audit, so the estimate isn’t built blind; a new build goes straight to scoping. Either way, nobody quotes a number before the work is understood.
Notes on Building High-Quality Software
A short founder’s note and a digest of what we’ve published, sent only when there’s something worth the inbox.