Startup, Professional or Enterprise: Choosing the Right Engagement

We publish our starting prices rather than hiding them behind a call, because a tier you can read in ten seconds saves everyone a week. But published numbers only help if you know which tier your project belongs in. This is how we decide.

The dividing line is authentication, not page count

People usually try to place themselves by counting screens. That is the wrong axis. A twelve-page brochure site is still a Startup build. A three-screen product where users log in, save data and pay you is a Professional one. What actually drives cost is whether the software has to remember who someone is and act on their behalf.

Startup — when it is genuinely enough

At $800 for a 4 to 6 week build, this covers a responsive site of up to a handful of pages, mobile optimisation, basic SEO setup, an SSL certificate, contact form integration, deployment, two rounds of revisions and 30 days of support afterwards.

It does not include a custom backend, payment gateways or an admin panel — and that is the point. If your goal is to look credible before a fundraise, validate demand, or replace a slow outdated site, adding those things would cost you weeks you do not need to spend yet.

Professional — where most projects land

At $3,500 across 8 to 12 weeks, this is the full-stack tier: 200 to 350 development hours, backend development, database setup, API integration, a payment gateway, an admin panel, three rounds of revisions and 90 days of support.

The admin panel is the part people forget to budget for and then immediately need. The moment real users exist, somebody on your team has to be able to see them, correct their data and answer their questions without messaging a developer.

Enterprise — when custom is the honest answer

Some projects genuinely cannot be quoted from a list: multi-tenant SaaS platforms, games, AI systems, anything integrating with existing enterprise infrastructure, or products expecting serious scale from day one. These run 12 weeks and up, with unlimited revisions and a 12 month support window, and are scoped individually.

If your project is here, a fixed number quoted before discovery would be a guess dressed up as a price. We would rather scope it properly.

Day rates versus project pricing

Alongside project pricing we work on day rates — $150 per day at the Startup level and $300 at the Professional level. Project pricing suits a defined outcome with a known finish line. Day rates suit ongoing work where the scope legitimately shifts week to week: an existing product needing continuous improvement, or a team that needs extra engineering capacity for a stretch.

If you are choosing between them, ask whether you can describe "done". If you can, take the project price — it moves the risk of overrun onto us. If you genuinely cannot, day rates will cost you less than a padded fixed quote.

What moves a project up a tier mid-build

• Adding user accounts to something originally scoped without them.
• Taking payments — a gateway brings compliance, refunds, failure states and reconciliation.
• Needing an admin panel once real users arrive.
• Integrating a system we have not seen, especially an older one with no documentation.
• A hard external deadline that requires running work in parallel.

Tier changes are a scoping conversation, not an invoice surprise. If work drifts past what was agreed, we say so before doing it, not after.

What the revision count actually means

Two, three and unlimited revisions sound like a simple ladder, but the number is less important than what counts as a revision. A revision is a round of consolidated feedback on delivered work — not an individual change request. Sending fifteen comments in one round is one revision. Sending one comment on fifteen separate days is fifteen interruptions, and that is what the limit is really there to prevent.

In practice, teams that collect feedback from all their stakeholders before sending it rarely reach their limit at any tier. Teams that forward opinions as they arrive run out early regardless of what number is on the contract.

What happens when support ends

Support windows — 30 days, 90 days, or 12 months — cover fixes to what we built: something broken, something not behaving as specified, a deployment issue. They are not a feature-development allowance, and they are not the same as hosting.

When the window closes, nothing switches off. Your code, your accounts and your deployment remain yours; we hand over documentation at launch precisely so you are not dependent on us. Most clients either continue on day rates for ongoing work, move to an occasional ad-hoc basis, or take it in-house. All three are fine outcomes, and we would rather say that plainly than build in artificial lock-in.

A note on the cheapest option

The Startup tier is not a reduced-quality version of the Professional tier. It is the same engineering standards applied to a smaller surface. What it genuinely lacks is the infrastructure a product needs once it holds user data and money — and buying that before you need it is one of the most common ways early budgets get wasted.

The opposite mistake is more expensive though. Scoping a product that clearly needs accounts and payments into the Startup tier to save money means rebuilding foundations three months later, which costs more than doing it once. If the two questions above point at Professional, start at Professional.

Still unsure which fits? Describe the project in the brief and pick "Need guidance" for budget. The proposal will come back with the tier we think is right and the reasoning behind it.