How we work

Many agency engagements are opaque: a pitch deck, a contract, silence, then a delivery. This page describes how ours run. We adjust as needed, but this is the default.

1. Initial technical audit (fixed price, paid in advance)

The first step is a short intro call, free and about 30 minutes, where we talk through what you need. If we are not the right team for the job, we say so on that call. Before we send a quote, we look at your store from the outside, free of charge. The usual first engagement is the initial technical audit: with the access you provide, we assess your store in six areas, from the platform and its updates to hosting, code, security, performance, and email and domain settings, plus any further areas agreed in the order.

You walk away with: a written report with the findings, their severity, the recommended course of action and an indicative cost estimate, which we present to you at an online meeting.

2. Plan (half a week, included)

We agree on what we’re doing, in what order, and with what success criteria, and that agreement becomes the written order for the engagement, with its fixed price. Any disagreement gets settled in writing before the build starts, not at week 8.

3. Build (fixed price for each engagement)

Implementation happens in your repo, on your branch model, in small reviewable PRs, so you see every change before it merges. A weekly written check-in covers what shipped, what’s next, and what’s blocking.

Your time commitment: one technical point of contact, 1–2 hours a week to review and decide. Less works if you prefer to delegate, and more if you want closer involvement.

4. Cutover (final week, included for migration-shaped projects)

Launch is the riskiest part of any migration, so we parallel-run with shadow traffic rather than flipping everything at once. A written go/no-go checklist is signed off before cutover, and we are on the call during the cutover itself. We deploy so that a release can be rolled back.

5. Operate (optional)

Runbooks, monitoring, alerting that only fires when human intervention is needed, and a written post-mortem template. Defects the delivered result had at handover are repaired free of charge if you report them within 90 days of the handover. After launch you can take over operations internally or keep us on a retainer, a monthly flat fee for an agreed scope such as incident backup and ongoing tuning.

What you get from us, every time

• Direct access to the engineers writing the code. The person git blame points at is the person on Slack, not an account manager relaying messages.
• A paper trail you can act on: scope, plan, reports, and post-mortems all land in writing.
• Deploys you can undo. When something fails, the cause can be established from the logs and the deploy rolled back. Your own team may have to do that one day, so we build for it.

What we ask of you

• One technical point of contact who can make decisions directly.
• The access we need to do the work, agreed with you: repository, production, third-party dashboards. Usually less than you’d expect.
• Honest information about what’s broken, what you’ve already tried, and what the organizational constraints are. The project goes faster when we’re not discovering these things mid-build.

Pricing

• Initial technical audit: a fixed price, invoiced and paid in advance (step 1 above).
• Build work: a fixed price for each engagement, usually invoiced after handover. Work the order does not describe is done only for a fixed price we quote and you approve in writing in advance.
• Retainers: a monthly flat fee for an agreed scope, invoiced at the start of each month. Either side can end a retainer with one month’s notice.

We do not bill by the hour: build work has a fixed price, and ongoing services a monthly flat fee.

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You get the contract, with all its terms in writing, before you sign. The counterpart to this page: What we don’t do.