Start With the Question, Not With the Model
Fixed price, a dedicated team, or a fractional CTO. Most people arrive asking which is cheapest. The more useful question is what you are actually uncertain about — because that decides the model, and picking the wrong one is the expensive mistake.
Four Questions and You Are Usually Left With One Answer
Work down this list in order. Whichever question you cannot answer confidently is the one that determines how you should buy.
1. Can you describe the finished thing in writing?
Not a vision — screens, rules, who does what. If yes, a fixed price is available to you. If no, anyone offering one is guessing and pricing the guess.
2. Will the priorities change every month?
If next month depends on what customers do this month, buying a fixed outcome means buying a change request every fortnight. Capacity fits better than a contract for one result.
3. Is the risk in building it, or in deciding it?
If the expensive mistakes ahead are choices — which supplier, which architecture, whether that quote is reasonable — you need judgement, not more hands.
4. Is there twelve months of work, or one job?
One job, however large, suits a fixed scope. A roadmap that keeps refilling suits a standing team, and the per-hour cost comes down as it does.
What Each One Is, in a Sentence
Every model uses the same engineers, the same fortnightly rhythm and the same ownership terms. What changes is who carries the estimating risk and what you commit to.
Fixed-Price Project
A written scope, one figure in sterling, staged payments against deliverables, and a change process on paper. If it takes us longer than we thought, your invoice does not move.
How the number is builtDedicated Team
Named engineers on your product by the month. You set the priorities, we run the team, and the size changes on 30 days notice rather than a recruitment cycle.
Compared with a permanent hireFractional CTO
Senior technical judgement by the month for founders without a technical background: architecture calls, supplier oversight, due diligence and hiring input.
What the role coversThe Differences You Will Feel in Month Three
Anyone can compare these on price. These are the rows that decide whether the arrangement is still comfortable a quarter in.
| Fixed-Price Project | Dedicated Team | Fractional CTO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The question it answers | What will this cost and when will it be finished? | How do we keep shipping without hiring? | Is this the right decision, and is that quote reasonable? |
| Who carries the estimating risk | Us. A longer build is our problem, not your invoice. | You. You are buying time, so a slower month is a slower month. | Not applicable — you are buying judgement by the hour. |
| How you are billed | Milestone payments in sterling, excluding VAT, against named deliverables | Monthly in advance per engineer, excluding VAT | Monthly against an agreed number of hours, excluding VAT |
| A change of mind | A written change request, priced, approved before it is built | Reorder the backlog before the next sprint. No paperwork. | It is a conversation. That is what the engagement is. |
| What you commit to | One defined outcome | Three months minimum, then 30 days notice | A month at a time, usually reviewed quarterly |
| Your time each week | Two to three hours for reviews and decisions | Three to five hours — you are doing the prioritising | A call, plus whatever you send over to be read |
| Where it tends to go wrong | Scope that was described optimistically at the start | Nobody on your side owning the priority list | Advice that arrives after the contract was already signed |
| Typical starting point | From around £8,000 ex VAT for a small defined build | From one engineer a month, scaling in whole people | A few hours a month up to roughly a day a week |
Figures are indicative starting points rather than a price list. The cost calculator gives a range for a specific build, and the pricing page explains what moves it.
The Two Ways People Choose Wrongly
We have watched both happen, including on projects we were running at the time.
Buying a fixed price for a discovery project
A scale-up wants certainty, so a fixed price is agreed around a product nobody has yet used. Six weeks in, real customers change the answer to almost every question, and every change becomes a variation with a price and an approval. The overhead of administering the contract starts to exceed the value of the certainty it bought. The tell is simple: if you are raising more than one change request a fortnight, you bought the wrong instrument.
Hiring a standing team for one defined job
The opposite failure. A professional services firm needs one integration built, engages two engineers monthly, and three months later the work is finished but the arrangement continues because stopping feels like a decision. Capacity without a queue behind it invents work to fill itself. If you can write down what done looks like, buy done rather than time.
What a Working Week Looks Like From Your Side
Identical in all three models. This is the part most clients say made the difference, and it is deliberately unglamorous.
Calls inside the morning overlap
The delivery team works to Indian Standard Time, which overlaps your day from around 9am to early afternoon UK time. Every scheduled call sits in that window, so nobody is dialling in at an unreasonable hour at either end.
A written update at the end of each day
What was done, what is next, what is blocked and what needs a decision from you. Written at the close of our working day, which lands in your inbox during your afternoon. Short, factual, and archived so nobody argues about what was said in a call.
A reply within one business day
Anything you raise gets a substantive answer within one business day, not an acknowledgement. Where the answer needs investigation, you get the interim position and a time for the rest.
A working build every two weeks
Not a slide about progress. Something you can open, click and hand to a colleague. If a fortnight passes with nothing you can try, that is a problem worth raising, and we would rather you raised it.
The limit, stated plainly
Something you send at 4pm UK time gets answered the following morning, not that evening. We are not a UK-based team, we do not keep a UK office, and there is no staffed round-the-clock rota. What we do commit to is your morning covered every working day, a written trail you can read at your own pace, and no surprises about which hours those are. If your situation genuinely needs someone available at 6pm, we will tell you at the first call rather than after you have signed.
Changing Model Without Losing a Fortnight
Plenty of engagements end in a different model from the one they started in. That is normal, and it is cheap if it happens at a sensible boundary.
Say it at a review, not at a crisis
The signal is usually obvious: too many change requests, or a team with nothing queued. Raise it at the monthly review while there is still a choice, rather than during the week something has gone wrong.
Finish the current unit of work
We change model at the end of a milestone or a sprint, never mid-flight. Half-built work handed across a contractual boundary is where money disappears.
Keep the same people
The engineers do not change because the paperwork did. The person who wrote the payment integration under a fixed price is the person on the team the following month, which is the whole point of switching rather than re-tendering.
New terms, same accounts
A revised agreement covering notice, billing and scope. Nothing moves technically — repositories, cloud accounts and store listings were in your name from week one and stay exactly where they are.
Running two models at once is common and perfectly sensible: a fixed-price rebuild of one module while a retainer keeps the live system upright, or a fractional CTO overseeing a team you employ yourself.
Terms That Do Not Vary by Model
Ownership from week one
Repositories, cloud accounts and store listings in your company name from the first week. Intellectual property assigned to you in writing. Nothing is retained as leverage, whichever way an engagement ends. Details on our NDA and IP page.
UK GDPR treated as design work
What personal data you hold, where it is stored, how long it is kept and how a subject access or deletion request is serviced are architecture decisions taken early. A data processing agreement is signed as a matter of course, and UK or EU data residency is available where you need it.
Sterling, ex VAT, 30-day terms
Quoted in pounds with VAT shown separately, invoiced against your purchase order number where you use one, payable within 30 days. We carry any currency movement between quote and invoice ourselves.
Practical Questions About Engaging Us
Our board wants a fixed budget but the product keeps changing. Which model survives that?
Split it. Put a fixed price around the part you can genuinely describe — the first release, the migration, the module finance is waiting for — so the board has a number to approve and a delivery date to hold you to. Run everything still being discovered outside that, either as a small dedicated team or as a series of separately quoted pieces. Trying to force a fixed price around work nobody can yet describe produces either a padded quote or a stream of change requests, and both damage the relationship. We would rather structure it honestly at the start than argue about variations in month four.
Can we raise a purchase order and pay on 30-day terms?
Yes. We invoice a UK limited company in sterling, quote excluding VAT and add VAT at the prevailing rate, and we put your purchase order number on the invoice where your finance system requires it. Standard terms are 30 days from invoice date. Fixed-price projects are invoiced against milestones, and retainers or dedicated teams are invoiced monthly in advance. Payment by bank transfer is normal; ongoing monthly arrangements can be set up on Direct Debit through GoCardless if that suits your finance team better.
Do you work through procurement portals or on framework agreements?
We can complete a supplier onboarding pack, a security questionnaire and an information governance form, and we have no objection to registering on a portal where a client needs it. What we will not do is claim a place on a framework we do not hold. If you are buying through a framework agreement, the practical route is usually a prime supplier or reseller who does hold it, with us delivering underneath. Tell us early, because the paperwork cycle is frequently longer than the first sprint.
What happens to the code and the accounts if we stop mid-sprint?
Nothing dramatic, because there is nothing to hand over. The repository, the cloud accounts and the store listings are in your company name from the first week, so stopping is a matter of removing our access rather than extracting your property. You get the work completed to that point, the documentation as it stands, and a written note of what was in progress and where we would have gone next. We invoice for work done and completed milestones. No exit fee, no hostage-taking, no final invoice that appears from nowhere.
Are prices quoted in sterling, and is VAT included?
Everything is quoted in pounds sterling and everything is stated excluding VAT, with VAT at the prevailing rate added on the invoice. We carry any currency movement ourselves — a sterling figure agreed in a proposal is the sterling figure on the invoice, whatever the exchange rate does in the meantime. Third-party costs such as cloud hosting, developer programme fees and paid APIs sit on your own accounts and are billed to you by those providers directly rather than routed through us.
How much of our own time does this take each week?
Budget two to four hours a week from one person who can make decisions. That covers a scheduled call, reading the end-of-day updates, trying the fortnightly build and answering questions about how your business actually works. The last of those is the part nobody anticipates: we can design a screen without you, but we cannot invent your refund rules, your pricing exceptions or the reason the Tuesday report has to be structured that way. Projects run late far more often because a decision waited three weeks than because an engineer was slow.
Describe the Situation and We Will Tell You Which One Fits
Including when the answer is that you do not need an agency yet. You get a scope, a delivery window and a sterling range within two working days.