Custom engineering work

Code we'd be willing to ship.

We spend most of our time auditing other people's code. When clients ask us to write the fix instead of name it, we say yes if the work is the kind we've shipped before. This page is what that includes and what it doesn't.

Email to scope a project
§ I. What we take on

Four shapes of engagement.

Different engagements move at different speeds. The shapes on the left are the ones we know well enough to scope on the first call.

We don't dress up engagements we haven't run before. If your project doesn't match one of these four, we'll say so.

  1. 01
    Post-audit hardening
    We audited your app and named what's broken. Sometimes the right next step is for us to ship the fixes ourselves, not hand you a list. Auth rewrites, payment flow rebuilds, the migrations AI skipped.
  2. 02
    Feature builds on AI-generated apps
    You have a Lovable, Bolt, or Cursor app and the next feature is the one your generator can't get right. We build it the way it should have been built the first time, with the negative tests AI doesn't write.
  3. 03
    Greenfield builds
    From scratch, when it's the kind of system we've shipped before: multi-tenant SaaS, payment infrastructure, retail and point-of-sale, internal platforms. If the work is outside what we've actually built, we say so on the call.
  4. 04
    Fractional engineering
    A few days a month embedded with your team. Code review, architecture decisions, picking up the work that keeps slipping. Not unlimited hours and not a retainer. Each month gets scoped before it starts.
§ II. How engagements work

Fixed price, scoped on a call, no hourly billing.

Every engagement starts with a scoping call. We write the deliverable down, agree on a fixed price, and ship. No hourly billing, no extended "discovery phase," no scope creep into work we didn't agree to.

We work in your repo with your review. Pull requests, code review, the tests that match what we shipped. You merge, we hand off.

Engagement length depends on the shape. Hardening sprints run one to four weeks. Feature builds run two to eight. Greenfield builds and fractional months get their own conversation.

§ III. When this isn't right

What we say no to.

We turn down work outside what we've shipped. If you need a mobile app, a real-time multiplayer system, a machine-learning pipeline, or anything else outside our domain, we're the wrong team. We'll say so on the call instead of taking the work and learning on your budget.

We also turn down work where the brief is too vague to scope. "Make it better" is not a brief. If the call surfaces that the project isn't ready for an engineering engagement yet, the honest answer is sometimes to start with an audit, sometimes to point you to a different partner.

Have a project in mind? Send a paragraph or two about what you need. We'll reply within a day with whether it's a fit, and what a scoping call would cover if it is.

Email to scope a project