How We Are Set Up, and What That Means for Your Week
Most agency about pages describe a culture. This one describes an arrangement: where the work happens, which hours of your day are covered, what we will commit to in writing, and the part of the arrangement that will not suit everybody.
Our Delivery Team Works Indian Standard Time
We would rather you read that in the first paragraph than discover it in week three. MakeMyApp UK sells to British companies and builds with an engineering team working to Indian Standard Time. There is no UK office, no British-based delivery pod and no round-the-clock rota, and any supplier telling you otherwise on a budget like ours is describing something that does not exist.
What the arrangement does give you is a genuine and useful overlap. IST runs four and a half hours ahead of UK time in winter and four and a half ahead of BST in summer, so the team’s working afternoon lands squarely on your morning. From roughly 9am UK time until early afternoon you are dealing with engineers who are awake, at their desks and able to make decisions with you rather than relaying them.
The limit is equally plain. Something you send at 4pm on a Tuesday is read and answered on Wednesday morning. If your operation genuinely needs an engineer reachable at 5pm, we are the wrong supplier and we will tell you so on the first call rather than after the deposit.
Your Day, Our Day, and the Hours in the Middle
Set against a UK clock, this is what a normal Tuesday looks like from your side of the arrangement.
You open your laptop to yesterday’s written update already sitting in your inbox. The team has been working for several hours and anything you flagged the previous afternoon has usually been picked up before you arrive.
The live window. Calls, screen shares, design reviews and the awkward questions that need a person rather than a thread all get booked here. Decisions made in this window are usually acted on the same day rather than the next one.
The team closes its day and writes the update: what moved, what is next, what is blocked and what it needs from you. That note is the handover. It is short, it is written every working day, and it is the thing you can hold us to.
Queued, not ignored. Anything raised late in your day is answered the following morning and shows up in the next update. For genuine production emergencies a support retainer sets a different escalation route, and that is priced separately and in writing.
What the Arrangement Buys You, and What It Does Not
Four columns, two of which most suppliers leave off their about page.
Hold us to these
- A written update at the close of every working day
- A reply to anything you raise within one business day
- A build you can install and use every two weeks
- Scope changes priced in writing before anyone starts them
Roughly 9am to early afternoon
- Scheduled calls and screen shares at whatever cadence suits you
- Same-day turnaround on questions asked before lunch
- Design and sprint reviews with the engineers who did the work
Possible, but agreed first
- An occasional later call for a board meeting, launch or investor demo
- A defined out-of-hours escalation route under a support retainer
- Working inside your own repository, ticket system and review process
Things we will not claim
- A UK-based delivery team or a British office
- Cover across the whole of your afternoon as standard
- Round-the-clock monitoring bundled into a build price
- An engineer on the end of a phone at 6pm on a Friday
If the fourth column is a problem for your business, that is a legitimate reason not to work with us, and we would rather you reached that conclusion from a web page than from an invoice.
Six Things We Do the Same Way on Every Engagement
Each one is a decision with a cost attached, which is why they are worth listing rather than asserting a set of values.
We Quote the Version You Can Afford to Finish
If the thing you describe is three times the size your budget supports, we say so in the first conversation and propose the version that fits. That is an awkward opening and it loses us some work. It also means the projects we do take on tend to reach a release rather than stopping at eighty per cent with the money gone.
Sterling, Excluding VAT, With the Extras Listed
Proposals show a figure in pounds excluding VAT, with VAT added at the prevailing rate on the invoice. Third-party costs you will pay directly — developer programme fees, cloud hosting, paid APIs, commercial licences — are listed with realistic figures rather than left for you to discover after go-live.
The Repository Is in Your Company Name First
Source control, the cloud project, the error monitoring, the domain and the app store listings are created under your limited company from week one, and we work inside them with our own accounts. Nothing is registered to us and reassigned later if the relationship stays friendly.
UK GDPR Is Settled Before Code, Not After
What personal data the system genuinely needs, which region it sits in, how long it is kept and how a subject access or erasure request will actually be serviced are architecture questions. Answering them at the design stage costs a conversation. Answering them after launch costs a migration.
A Build You Can Open, Not a Progress Report
Every fortnight there is something you install on your own phone or open in your own browser. Reports are easy to write and impossible to check. A build that does not do what the report claimed is obvious within thirty seconds, which keeps the conversation honest in both directions.
We Turn Work Down in Week One
Some enquiries are better served by an off-the-shelf product, a no-code tool or a supplier with a regulatory specialism we do not have. Saying so early costs us a fee. Saying so in week six, after taking a deposit, costs you a great deal more, and it is the single most common complaint we hear about previous suppliers.
Read Both Columns Before You Send Anything
A poor fit costs you money and costs us the reference. These lists are drawn from the enquiries that went well and the ones that did not.
We tend to work well with
- UK limited companies without an in-house engineering team, where one named person can make decisions without convening a committee.
- Founders and operations directors who can join a call in the morning rather than only after four.
- Businesses replacing a spreadsheet or a manual process that a real team depends on — letting agents chasing tenancy paperwork, multi-site retailers reconciling stock, logistics firms handling customs documentation.
- Companies whose previous agency or contractor stopped replying, who need a straight verdict on what is salvageable before spending anything more.
- Buyers who want the scope cut down to something finishable and are prepared to argue about which features go in phase two.
- Organisations with a real UK GDPR obligation who want data residency, retention and subject access designed in rather than promised.
We are the wrong choice if
- You need an engineer contactable through your whole afternoon, or on-call at weekends, without a support retainer that prices it.
- Your procurement process requires the delivery team to be physically located in the United Kingdom, or a UK-registered supplier on a framework agreement.
- You want a fixed price for a scope that genuinely cannot be pinned down yet — that is a monthly arrangement wearing the wrong label, and pretending otherwise ends badly for both sides.
- The budget is well under the range the work needs, and the answer required is that it can be done anyway.
- You are looking for a technical co-founder taking equity instead of fees. We are a supplier and we invoice.
- The project carries a regulatory burden that demands an audited specialist — certain FCA-regulated permissions or clinical safety work under DCB0129 are examples where you should engage someone who does that specifically.
Unsure which column you sit in? Say so on the call. We have declined work for being a poor fit and it has never been the wrong decision.
Everything We Have Deliberately Left Off This Page
There is no founding-year story, no headcount, no client count, no logo wall, no award badges and no office address. That is not modesty. It is that every one of those is trivial to invent, impossible for you to verify from a web page, and routinely inflated across this industry.
What we have put here instead are claims you can test cheaply and early: book a call inside the overlap window and see whether engineers turn up; ask for the daily update in the first week and see whether it arrives; ask for the repository to be created under your company before any code is written and see whether it is.
If a supplier passes those three tests in the first fortnight, the founding year stops mattering. If they fail them, no amount of logos on an about page will help you.
How an engagement is structuredTest the Claims Before You Commit to Anything
Send a short description and we will come back within two working days with a scope, a delivery window and a sterling range excluding VAT — yours to keep whether or not you engage us.