§ 01 — Rates
Pricing, plainly.
Transparent rates. Simple terms. No surprise billings, retainers that quietly roll, or finance-ops theatre. One line item per week.
Standard Pricing
Sprint 0
Discovery & Scoping
1 week
Full audit of the stuck backlog item. Scoping, risk assessment, and a clear execution plan. You keep the deliverable regardless of next steps.
Full Program
5–10 person team equivalent
2 weeks of results per week
Full-velocity execution across a larger scope. Senior judgment plus AI tooling operating at the capacity of an entire team.
Focused Project
2–5 person team equivalent
2 weeks of results per week
Targeted execution on a bounded problem. Ideal for single-service migrations, focused API modernizations, or a contained legacy cleanup.
Intro Pricing
New clients get intro rates during the early-client phase of this practice:
Same velocity. Same 2-weeks-in-1 delivery. Lower rate for new clients.
What's Included in Every Engagement
Automated Testing
Available as add-on during or after any program.
Startup Phase
Ongoing Maintenance (per 2-week sprint)
Private Execution
For clients with NDA-sensitive codebases or strict data handling requirements. AI tooling runs locally — your code, your context, and your work product never touch a public cloud API.
- Local AI execution — no public cloud models
- Code and context stay in your environment
- Suitable for confidential IP and regulated industries
- Mutual NDA signed before Sprint 0 on request
- No client code retained after an engagement ends
- Available on any program tier
Not sure if you need this? If you can't share your codebase with a cloud AI provider under your current agreements, you need it. On any tier, access is client-granted and revocable, work lands in your repos, and our data-handling policy applies.
Need SOC2 compliance? Air-gapped environment? Custom data handling agreements? Let's discuss your requirements.
Contact for Enterprise Pricing →Where your offshore spend actually goes.
Before you compare rates, audit theirs. Most of that monthly spend isn't buying shipped software.
Daily standups, sprint planning, retros, grooming, reviews. A 10-person team burns roughly 85 person-hours a week in meetings that don't ship code. You're paying for every one of them.
Every ticket crossing a timezone loses a business day. If it bounces back for clarification, two. It's why "picked it up yesterday" means "shipped next week."
PRs queue behind a senior who's already in meetings, then get rubber-stamped by a peer without domain context. The bottleneck isn't writing the code — it's waiting to merge it.
New joiners take 6–12 weeks to be productive. Staff aug rotates. Offshore teams turn over. On any given week, a share of the team is still ramping — at full rate.
Where the money actually goes.
You pay the whole invoice every month. But only the hours that hit the codebase move your backlog. Add up the four items above — ceremony, handoffs, review queues, ramp — and most of a traditional engagement isn't buying shipped code.
Whatever your offshore team bills, roughly two-thirds of it isn't buying shipped code — it's buying coordination. Of what you pay this practice, nearly all of it hits the codebase. That's the delta. Check our rates against it.
Throughput estimates follow industry research on developer time allocation. Your team may land above or below — run your own numbers.
Same backlog. Same calibration. Half the calendar.
Your team pointed the backlog. Your scale, your stories. We close more of it per sprint.
Representative numbers. Swap in your team's actual velocity — the ratio holds.
And when a sprint needs more — we flex.
Offshore can't. And if they try, they lose the thing you actually need: continuity.
Light sprint? A couple of agents on a handful of tickets. Heavy sprint — migration week, release prep, a parallelizable refactor? Dozens of agents running in parallel under one director.
Same weekly rate. Capacity flexes to the sprint.
Fixed headcount. Overstaffed on light sprints, bottlenecked on heavy ones. Swap bodies in to flex up and the new people spend 1–2 weeks learning the codebase — right when you needed the speedup.
You pay to flex, and you lose velocity when you do.
One person holds the context across every sprint. Agents come and go. Architectural decisions, code conventions, domain knowledge — all in one head, not scattered across rotating bodies.
This isn't a knock on anyone's team — it's that the ceiling for what a well-directed model produces has moved past what a team of mid-level developers produces on scoped work. You're paying team-of-ten prices for what a senior and the tools now do directly.
You're not paying less for less.
You're paying less for more shipped code.
Principal-led. Here's how that works.
You're right to ask who's actually behind the rate card. Here are the straight answers.
Who actually does the work?
Every engagement is principal-led: the senior operator you meet on the first call scopes the work, stays hands-on, and owns delivery end to end. Nothing is handed off to juniors or rotated behind the scenes.
What if the lead operator is unavailable?
Billing is weekly with a one-week cancel notice — if a week doesn't happen, you don't pay for it. All work lands in your repository daily with written context, so nothing lives in one head. You can pause, resume, or walk away at any week boundary.
Can you run parallel workstreams?
Yes. Program engagements bring additional vetted senior resources in under the same model — one accountable principal, direct access, and none of the coordination tax passed to you. Scoped projects run one workstream at a time by design.
How does this replace a 5–10 person team?
It doesn't replace the people — it replaces the throughput on a scoped backlog item. No standups, handoffs, or coordination overhead means the hours go into the work. The Full Program rate is priced against that team's output on the item, not their headcount.
Simple Terms
$2K to Find Out If It Can Move
Sprint 0. One week. No commitment.