Fixed-scope discovery, then continuous delivery.

Custom builds start around $40,000–$60,000; below that an off-the-shelf tool is usually the honest answer and we will say so. Past the floor it is quoted against your budget and what you actually need, rather than printed as a range that would be wrong for most of the people reading it. Two lines do carry a published price, the website build and its care plan, and they are on the services page. Discovery is a fixed fee, agreed in advance. Delivery is quoted against a written scope, in phases, with each phase’s cost and exit criteria fixed before that phase starts, so the decision to continue is yours at every boundary and there is no open meter. There is no minimum engagement: the shortest piece of work on this site took an hour, and the one beside it took four weeks. Tell us the budget you have on the first call and we will tell you what is achievable inside it, including when the honest answer is that it is not. If you would rather know before you spend a call, put the budget you have in your first message and we will answer that question in the reply.

On résumé, they are ahead, and you should discount anyone who tells you otherwise. There are onshore firms in this space that have been doing it for eighteen, thirty, even fifty years, with senior engineers and named clients in your industry. The difference we would ask you to weigh is structural rather than technical. Most firms our competitors’ size specialize in one layer and subcontract or decline the rest, so the seams between the control network, the application, the estate and the security review end up owned by whoever is left in the room. We run those as four divisions inside one company, staffed separately and briefed together, which is why the escalation path ends somewhere useful instead of at a vendor boundary. That is the trade on offer: longer history and more logos on one side, and on the other a smaller senior team that can follow the problem across every layer it touches.

Discovery usually starts within two to three weeks. A full delivery team typically needs four to six weeks of notice, though we occasionally have earlier availability; it’s worth asking.

Usually between them, and the honest answer is that we want both of them to stay. Your integrator should keep the control layer, the PLCs and everything at or below the line where a mistake stops production; they hold vendor certifications and site knowledge we are not going to duplicate. Your ERP partner should keep everything inside the ERP, where they know the data model and the upgrade path far better than we will. What often has no owner is the layer in between: the browser-facing application your operators actually use, the queue and the retry between the two systems, the identity and audit trail that lets you answer a question about one record on one day. Neither of those firms is structurally set up to own that, and both need it to exist. That layer is what we are for, and we would rather scope it beside your existing vendors than ask you to replace them. If the cleanest route is for us to sit under your existing vendor’s contract rather than beside it, we will work that way; say so early, because it changes the paperwork rather than the plan.

Preferably. Most of our best outcomes are blended teams. Your engineers know the business; ours bring practices and capacity. It also makes the eventual hand-off almost free.

Yes, and the first thing we hand back is an assessment rather than code. It is a paid piece of work: what the code and the data are worth keeping, what the remaining work actually is, and what finishing would cost against what replacing would cost, with the reasoning written down so you can take it to somebody else. Sometimes the honest answer is that the foundation is sound and the project just lost its owner. Sometimes it is that you should throw it away, and we will tell you that too, in writing, before you commit to a build. What we will not do is quote a finish price off a demo and a repository we have not read.

Thirty days’ notice after the first release, for any reason, with no termination fee. What you take with you when you go is settled in the engagement agreement before any work starts, and the hand-off phase is in the plan from the beginning rather than negotiated on the way out. We’d rather you were able to leave easily and chose not to.

Yes. We work under client paper rather than asking you to work under ours, and we redline rather than refuse. Security is handled through an exhibit written for your data rather than a pointer to our own policy, and the terms we will agree to there include notification of any actual or suspected incident within 24 hours, the content and timing of any notification to your customers or regulators left entirely in your control, a BAA where PHI is involved, and support for joint security testing. Questionnaires are part of onboarding rather than an afterthought. Send the requirements early, including whatever insurance you require us to carry, and we’ll flag anything we can’t meet.

Usually one of three ways, and we will tell you which is fastest for your institution rather than the one that suits us. First, subcontracting: we work under a prime who already holds the vehicle, which is the most common route for a firm at our stage and needs nothing new from your procurement office. Second, your own delegated authority: many institutions can issue a purchase order directly for services under their own limit, and those limits are set locally rather than centrally, so the number is yours to confirm. Third, a cooperative or state vehicle you already use. Being plain about that third one: we hold no cooperative or state contract awards today. Awards on those come through competitive solicitation cycles rather than on request, they are published, and any vendor implying otherwise is worth checking. If a vehicle is the only viable path for you, the honest answer is that we are the wrong firm this fiscal year, and we will say so on the first call rather than in month two.

All in the United States, all in Central time. We don’t subcontract delivery offshore. If a role requires clearance, citizenship or on-site presence, tell us early and we’ll be direct about whether we can staff it.

In the engagement agreement, in writing, before any work starts. Ownership and licensing are commercial terms rather than something we publish a standard answer to here, and they are settled with you during scoping. What we will say in general is that we do not rely on “work made for hire” language to do it: work for hire is a copyright doctrine that does not reach patents or trade secrets, and it reaches commissioned work only in nine narrow statutory categories that software is not one of, so whatever is agreed is agreed by express assignment. Any third-party or open-source component we use is listed with its license.

Acceptance criteria go in the statement of work, in objective terms, before the work starts. If something doesn’t meet them we fix it at our cost inside a defined window. Nothing is ever deemed accepted because time passed, and a holdback on each phase is released only on acceptance of that phase. If we can’t get it right, you stop paying for it.

Every change is priced and signed before work on it starts. We also rewrite our own assumptions as your obligations with dates attached, because an unstated assumption is how a contractor creates an exit and a change-order revenue stream at the same time. On estimated work we agree an overrun mechanism up front: modest variance is ours to absorb as the normal play in an estimate, and a large miss means the estimate was a guess, which is our problem rather than yours.

Mutual, with carve-outs that sit outside the cap: IP infringement indemnity, gross negligence, willful misconduct, and deliberate misuse of your confidential information. A cap that swallows the indemnity makes the indemnity decorative. We draw one line deliberately: a confidentiality breach we caused on purpose is uncapped, and one caused by a mistake sits under the cap or under a higher security-specific cap we will agree. We would rather tell you where our insurance actually reaches than promise an unlimited number that nothing funds. We’ll negotiate it against the size and criticality of the engagement, and we’d rather have that conversation on the first call than in week six.

Whatever the engagement agreement says, and it says it before any work starts rather than at the end. Ownership, licensing and where the code and infrastructure are held are settled in writing during scoping, which is also what decides whether an escrow arrangement is worth anything to you. What does not depend on that negotiation: the hand-off phase is in the plan from the start rather than improvised under pressure, your data is exported in a platform-neutral format as well as ours and then certified destroyed to NIST SP 800-88, documentation, runbooks and architecture decision records are written as the work happens rather than assembled at the end, and there is a named handover contact for a defined window after the last day.