Buyers researching US-based development usually find hourly rates between $110 and $250 and reasonably conclude that a serious build is out of reach. That conclusion follows from the unit, not from the arithmetic. An hourly rate tells you what an hour costs and nothing about how many hours you will buy, how many produce work that survives contact with your business, or how much of your own team's week the engagement will consume.
This page states what we actually charge, how the pricing model works, and where it does and does not compete with a lower-rate alternative.
We price increments, not hours
An engagement is a sequence of defined increments. Each one has a fixed price agreed before work starts, a fixed duration, and an output you can act on: working software in production, or a decision backed by evidence. When an increment lands, the next one is priced against something that exists rather than against a document written by someone who had not yet seen the data.
This matters commercially for a reason that has nothing to do with geography. Pricing eight weeks of defined work is a forecast. Pricing eighteen months of undefined work is a bet, and vendors price bets with a risk premium you pay regardless of whether the risk materializes. Removing that premium is a large part of how the numbers below stay competitive.
What engagements actually cost
| Shape | Typical range | Duration | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Focused assessment | $15,000 - $40,000 | 2 - 5 weeks | A written analysis of the system, the data, and the options, with a costed recommendation you own and could hand to any vendor |
| Bounded first release | $40,000 - $120,000 | 6 - 12 weeks | One real workflow in production, used by real people, integrated with what you keep |
| Platform replacing a core system | $250,000 - $1.5M | 6 - 18 months, phased | A purpose-built system delivered in stages, each one live before the next begins |
| Integration or automation increment | $25,000 - $90,000 | 3 - 8 weeks | A monitored, owned connection between systems with defined failure handling |
These are ranges rather than quotes because the variables that move them are real: how many systems the work touches, how much history has to migrate, how clean that history is, and how badly the business is affected if the system is unavailable for an afternoon. Screen count barely matters. Integrations, data migration, and permissions decide the number.
Why the arithmetic works
A reasonable objection at this point is that a US-based team simply cannot reach these totals at US salaries. The answer is that the totals are not produced by a low rate. They are produced by needing fewer hours and wasting fewer of them.
- Fewer people: three senior engineers who can do their own analysis replace a larger mixed team plus the layer required to coordinate it
- No account layer: the people you talk to are the people writing the software, so your description of the business does not travel through two intermediaries
- Minimal specification burden: we do the analysis in your operating environment rather than asking you to produce a document precise enough to build from
- Same-day decisions: a blocking question costs an hour rather than an overnight cycle, several times a week, for the length of the build
- Rework inside the increment: a misunderstanding found before the increment is called done is absorbed by us, not billed to you as a change
The last point is the one that most often decides a total. Work priced per hour has no financial reason to prevent rework, because rework is billable. Work priced per increment has every reason to prevent it. That is not a claim about character; it is what the contract does to both parties, and it is worth interrogating in any vendor's pricing model including ours.
Where a lower-rate team wins
We would rather lose a bid early than lose an engagement in month four, so it is worth being direct about the cases where this model is the wrong purchase.
- You have a complete, stable specification that someone competent has already written and validated
- The work is implementation against a documented API or an existing design system, with an unambiguous definition of done
- You need sustained capacity on a stable codebase whose domain rules are already written down
- You have an experienced in-house technical lead with time to direct external developers daily
- You need a large team quickly and the work genuinely parallelizes
In those situations the specification-writing and clarification costs that dominate a discovery-heavy engagement are already paid, and buying capacity at a lower rate is straightforwardly the better decision.
What is included and what is not
A price is only meaningful alongside what it covers, and this is where quotes most often turn out to be incomparable.
| Included | Not included |
|---|---|
| Analysis and design of the increment | Third-party licences and cloud spend, which you own directly |
| Implementation, tests, and code review | Hardware, devices, and network changes on your side |
| Data migration for the scope in question | Ongoing support, which is a separate arrangement |
| Deployment and the cutover for that workflow | Work outside the agreed acceptance criteria |
| Rework to meet the agreed acceptance criteria | New requirements discovered mid-increment, which are priced into the next one |
| Documentation and handover of what was built | Training beyond the team involved in the rollout |
You own the source code, the infrastructure accounts, and the documentation from the first day, not on completion. That is a term worth confirming with every vendor you talk to, and one worth taking to your counsel rather than settling in a sales conversation.
How to get a real number
- 1
Describe the outcome in business terms: what someone should be able to do at the end that they cannot do now.
- 2
Expect a conversation about the systems involved, the state of the data, and who makes decisions, rather than an immediate figure.
- 3
Get a fixed price for the first increment, with a duration and acceptance criteria written down.
- 4
Deliver it, then price the second increment against what the first one revealed.
- 5
Continue, adjust, or stop. Stopping after any increment is a supported outcome and you keep everything produced.
Any vendor who gives you a confident total for an eighteen-month program from a two-page brief is quoting a number they will need to renegotiate. That applies to us as much as to anyone else, which is why we do not do it.
Common questions
- What is your hourly rate?
- We do not quote one, because it is not the unit we sell and it would not tell you what the work costs. Engagements are priced as fixed increments with a defined output. If you need an hourly figure for a procurement process, we can produce one for the specific engagement, but it is a derived number rather than the basis of the price.
- How can this compete with an offshore quote?
- Because the comparison that decides your spend is cost per delivered increment, not cost per hour. Fewer people, no coordination layer, far less specification effort on your side, and rework absorbed inside a fixed price can land on a comparable total. On well-specified work it will not, and we would tell you that rather than take the engagement.
- Why is a focused assessment worth $15,000 or more?
- Because its output is the thing that makes every subsequent quote real: a written understanding of the systems, the data quality, the integration surface, and the options with costs attached. It is deliberately structured so you own it and could take it to any vendor. Buyers who skip this step usually pay for it later as a change order.
- Do you take fixed-bid work for a whole program?
- Rarely, and only when the specification is genuinely complete and stable, which is uncommon for operational software. Pricing an entire undefined program as one fixed number requires a risk premium you pay whether or not the risk appears, and it gives us a financial reason to read your requirements narrowly. Increments avoid both.
- What happens if an increment costs you more than you quoted?
- We absorb it, provided the work is within the agreed acceptance criteria. That is the point of fixing the price at a size we can estimate honestly. If something is discovered mid-increment that genuinely changes the scope, it is raised immediately and priced into the following increment rather than negotiated as a change order.