Fixed-scope discovery, then continuous delivery.

We would rather give you a number here than make you book a call for one. Discovery is a fixed fee, generally $25,000–$60,000 depending on the size of the estate and how many systems we need to map. A first production release with a small team is usually a $180,000–$450,000 range of work. Those are what engagements of this shape cost and what we would expect to quote — not an average of ours, because we are new enough that an average would be three numbers in a trench coat, and you should discount any firm that pretends otherwise. Yours is quoted against a written scope, in phases, with each phase’s cost and exit criteria fixed before it starts, so the decision to continue is yours at every boundary. If your budget is smaller than that, say so on the call: we will tell you whether the problem is buildable for it, including when the answer is no.

Honestly? On résumé, badly, 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, named clients in your industry and reference calls we cannot match yet. If your decision rests on track record alone, hire one of them; several are genuinely excellent and we will name them on the call. The difference we would ask you to weigh is commercial rather than technical. We publish what work costs, the method by which we produce an estimate and who pays when it is wrong, and the terms on which you leave — before you talk to us, not in a negotiation. Very few firms in this tier publish the last two, and the reason is that they are commitments rather than claims: they constrain us, they are checkable against what we actually do, and copying them costs something. That is the trade on offer. Longer history and more logos on one side; published commitments and a smaller senior team that will tell you when not to build, on the other.

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. If your integrator can do it inside their platform and that is genuinely the right answer, we will tell you so and there is no engagement here. And 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.

Often, yes — several of our engagements began as someone else’s half-finished build. We start with a paid assessment of what exists: what the code and data are worth keeping, what the remaining work actually is, and what it would cost to finish versus to replace. 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.

Thirty days' notice after the first release, for any reason, with no termination fee. Everything built to that point is yours and deployed in your accounts. We’d rather you were able to leave easily and chose not to.

Yes. We work under client paper regularly and carry professional and cyber liability coverage. Security is handled through an exhibit written for your data rather than a pointer to our own policy: we notify you of any actual or suspected incident within 24 hours, leave the content and timing of any notification to your customers or regulators entirely in your control, sign BAAs where PHI is involved, and support joint security testing. Questionnaires are part of onboarding rather than an afterthought. Send the requirements early 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, across several time zones. 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.

By present assignment of all intellectual property rights, not by calling it work made for hire. Work for hire is a copyright doctrine: it doesn’t reach patents or trade secrets, and it doesn’t apply to a contractor’s work at all. Every person who touches your codebase, employee or subcontractor, is under written assignment before they start, and any third-party or open-source component we use is listed with its licence.

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 the usual carve-outs: breach of confidentiality, IP infringement indemnity, gross negligence and willful misconduct sit outside the cap rather than inside it. A cap that swallows the indemnity makes the indemnity decorative. We’ll negotiate the number against the size and criticality of the engagement, and we’d rather have that conversation on the first call than in week six.

Everything, because it was never anywhere else. Code, infrastructure and accounts are in your name from the first commit. Data is exported in a platform-neutral format as well as ours and then certified destroyed to NIST SP 800-88. Documentation and runbooks are written as the work happens, not assembled during a hand-off. There is no escrow arrangement because there’s nothing we hold that you don’t.