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DevBatch

Pricing · What you're actually buying

You should be buying a result, not a timesheet.

Hourly billing made sense when hours were the thing that produced the software. They are not any more, and the arithmetic has turned strange: as the work compresses, an hourly firm bills you less for the same result and quietly loses the incentive to get better at it. Here is what we do instead, including the numbers.

Get a scoped quote →What "delivered" means

The problem with hours

An hourly contract punishes both of us.

When tooling compresses a piece of work so it takes a third of the time, an hourly firm has just cut its own revenue by two thirds for an identical outcome. That is not a moral failing, it is the contract doing what it was written to do. But it means the firm's interests and yours point in opposite directions on the one question that matters — whether to get faster.

It is worse from a distributed cost base, which is where a lot of the industry now sits. The hours shrink and geography caps the rate, so competing on hourly price becomes a race to the bottom against every low-cost region, for hours that are disappearing anyway. That is not a race worth entering.

What you actually buyBilling by the hour shrinks the invoice as the work compresses. Pricing on the deliverable is a fixed value-anchored fee plus a bounded outcome component, with the unprovable residual left explicitly open.BILLED BY THE HOURHOURS — you pay for effort, not result← the work compresses; so does the invoiceSame outcome, fewer hours, smaller bill. Getting better at this would cost us both.PRICED ON THE DELIVERABLEFIXED FEEanchored to the value of the deliverableBOUNDEDoutcome componentNOT PROMISEDyour users, data,marketAcceptance is named in the contract before work starts: the conformance rows, the reconciliation, the panel verdicts.
A fixed fee, a bounded outcome component, and an open edge we do not promise.

What makes it possible

You can't sell a result you can't evidence.

The reason most firms cannot move off hours is not nerve. It is that the moment you propose being paid for a result rather than for time, the client asks the obvious question — how will we both know it was delivered — and if the answer is a shrug, you are back to selling the only thing you can evidence, which is hours.

So acceptance gets named in the statement of work, before anything is built: the conformance rows that must show no open gap, the reconciliation against a trusted answer where one exists, the review verdicts, and the date each was last verified. Not a milestone anyone can argue about afterwards. A document that either says pass or names the gap.

The shapes

Three deal shapes. Real numbers.

These are the ranges our current engagements actually sit in, not a rate card built to look competitive. The right shape depends on how settled your scope is — which is usually the first thing we work out on the call.

01

Senior capacity · monthly

For engineering teams that need people, not a project. Time and materials plus a retainer, $25k–$100k+/mo depending on pod size. The shape most of our US SaaS work takes, and the one that expands mid-engagement most often.

02

Defined build · fixed + maintenance

For a scoped platform with a real specification behind it. Fixed cost against the deliverable plus an annual maintenance contract, typically $300k–$500k+/yr. The shape hospital groups and procurement teams sign.

03

Fixed plus bounded outcome

Where the work drives something you can measure and we can both see. A value-anchored fixed fee plus a capped component tied to one agreed metric in a defined window. We propose this where an oracle exists — not everywhere, because it would be theatre everywhere else.

Where the full engine runs

And where running it would be over-engineering.

Proof is not free. Independent acceptance, reconciliation and a review panel all cost real hours, and a firm that pretends otherwise is either not doing them or not shipping. So the depth is scoped to the stakes rather than applied uniformly and billed as virtue.

The full battery runs where correctness is the product: money movement, clinical or patient surfaces, regulated reporting, anything where being confidently wrong is the expensive outcome. A lighter subset runs on marketing surfaces, internal tools and low-blast-radius work — and we tell you which layers we did not run and why, because a gap you have been told about is a decision and a gap you have not is a defect waiting for your users.

The honest edges

What we are not claiming on this page.

No guaranteed outcomes, at any price. We price correctness against a specification, because that is what we control and can evidence. The part that depends on your users, your data and your market is bounded and shared in the contract — it is never sold as a promise, whatever the fee structure.

This is our model, not a proven commercial record. We are describing how we price and why we think it is the right way round. We are not showing you a portfolio of outcome-priced engagements that paid off, because the honest answer is that this is where our practice is moving rather than a finished story with results attached.

The cost of proof is measured, not assumed. We track verification hours as a fraction of delivery so we can tell you where the discipline pays and where it does not. If it turns out not to pay on a given kind of work, the useful thing is to know that and price accordingly, not to defend the method.

FAQ

The commercial questions, answered straight.

Why not just quote me an hourly rate?
We will, and most engagements still start there — it is the honest instrument when you need capacity and the scope moves weekly. What we won't do is pretend it is a good deal for you on defined work. On a scoped build, an hourly rate means you carry the risk of our estimate being wrong and you pay more when we work slower. Fixed-against-the-deliverable moves that risk onto us, which is where it belongs.
What stops the fixed fee from becoming a change-request mill?
The feasibility review before the spec locks, and the fact that the change register is visible to you rather than a lever we operate privately. Genuine scope changes are real and get priced. What is not a change is us having misunderstood something we should have surfaced as a question before building — that is a defect and we fix it forward at our cost. The register makes the difference checkable rather than a matter of who is more persuasive.
How do you cap a bounded outcome component?
In writing, before the work starts: one metric, one measurement window, one agreed source of truth, and a stated maximum. If we cannot name all four, we do not propose the component at all. An outcome component with a vague metric is a dispute with a delay on it.
Doesn't all the verification make you more expensive?
It is a real cost and we scope it rather than assume it away. On correctness-critical work it pays for itself and then some, because catching a wrong assumption at the spec gate is orders of magnitude cheaper than catching it in production. On low-stakes work the full battery is over-engineering, so we run a lighter subset, tell you which layers we did not run, and price accordingly.
Can you tie your fee to our revenue?
Only as a bounded component, never as the whole fee and never open-ended. Your revenue depends on your users, your pricing, your market and a dozen things neither of us controls. A firm that offers to be paid purely on your business result is either not thinking clearly about it, or is planning to argue with you later about attribution.
Is there a minimum engagement?
In practice, yes. Below roughly $25k/mo of capacity, or a build under about $150k, the overhead of running this properly is a bad deal for you — you would be paying for a discipline the work does not need. We would rather say so on the first call than take it and under-serve it.

Get a number against your actual scope.

Bring the work and the constraint you're under. Thirty minutes, no deck — you'll leave knowing the shape, the range, and whether we're the wrong firm for it.

Get a scoped quote →Email Waqas direct