THE SOFTWARE PARTNERSHIP / FULL OFFER Back to the pitch × The engagement in writing: scope, working rhythm, investment and handover. Read at your own pace, then return to your place in the pitch.
Governing terms ↗ The engagement letter ↗ What you get A fractional CTO: the software partner your business does not currently have. We own the tech side: we build it, ship it, and keep it running. If you already know what you want, we build it. Where it is not obvious what to build, working that out with you is part of the job. One partner is accountable for the result, so you are not managing a developer, briefing an agency, or chasing a vendor list.
We also start a step earlier than most. Before we build, we ask the business questions: what this needs to do, what it will cost to run once it exists, and whether a simpler version gets you the same result. That conversation happens with you, not instead of you. Sometimes it means we come back and suggest something smaller than what was asked for, and you decide from there.
How we start, and why the first stretch is not the same for everyone Building software has got faster. Building the right software has not. Before anything serious gets written, we need to understand how your business actually works: what the product really is, what varies, and what matters.
How long that takes depends on how much there is to understand.
A straightforward problem: days. The shape is clear, the rules are few, and building starts almost immediately. A specialised or technical business: longer, and worth it. Every industry has its own vocabulary, its own way of classifying what it sells, and its own rules about what actually matters. You know those far better than we ever will. Our job in these first weeks is to ask enough of the right questions to get them right, so that what we build fits how the work is really done rather than how it looks from the outside. The data question: this one usually sets the pace. The work moves fastest when the information we need already exists in a form we can read, an export, a spreadsheet, a system we can connect to. Where it lives on paper, or across several formats, or only in someone's head, it has to be captured and structured before software can do anything useful with it. That work is part of the retainer rather than a separate charge, and the only thing it changes is what a month looks like: while it is going on you will see fewer new builds, and the Friday note will say so in plain words. We will tell you what we think this period looks like before you commit, and we will tell you again the moment we learn we were wrong. You will not discover in month three that we misjudged month one.
Then the work runs on a rhythm Once we know what we are building, this is the rhythm we work to, counted in working days from when a request comes up the queue. These are our norms rather than a guarantee on any single item, and if something is going to miss, you hear it in the Friday note before the date, not after.
Small changes: usually within a working day. Medium changes: about 2 to 3 working days. Bigger builds: about a week per phase. Once the shape is agreed, the first usable version is normally in your hands inside two weeks, and gets sharper from there through real use. You drop requests in one place and we work through them one build at a time on Focus, two on Momentum, finishing each before the next one starts, so nothing sits half done.
None of that means we are hard to reach. We are around through the week for anything that needs a conversation, and there is room for a call or two a month as a matter of course, more in the early weeks while we are still learning your business. Working this way simply means the build keeps moving between those conversations instead of waiting for the next one.
Every Friday you get a short note: what shipped, what is next, what we need from you. It goes out in the quiet weeks too, especially then. If a Friday is a holiday or we are travelling, it lands the next working day. It still lands.
How we keep it moving You have a business to run, and we would rather you ran it than managed us. So the queue is built to keep moving on its own: if a decision is waiting on you for more than three working days, we make the call ourselves, write down what we decided and why, and keep shipping. Tell us to change any of those later and it joins the queue like any other build. Nothing stalls just because a week got busy.
The investment Two tiers, both a flat monthly fee, billed 100% in advance:
Focus: $4,000 per month. One active build at a time. Momentum: $7,000 per month. Two active builds at a time. We never change a rate mid-month, and any change to your rate is agreed with you in writing before the month it applies to.
One invoice a month, no surprise line items. The fee covers the technical strategy, the roadmap, the builds in your queue, and keeping what we have already shipped working.
Our fee is for our work and nothing else. Whatever a build actually runs on, hosting, subscriptions, API usage, any third-party service, is yours: set up in your own accounts wherever we can, or passed on to you at cost where we cannot. We will always tell you before something starts costing money, and we keep those choices as lean as they sensibly can be.
Two other things are always quoted and approved before we start them: anything that takes us outside Mumbai, and anything that is not software we build for you, which includes hardware, networks, devices, and software other vendors sold you. If we ever think a request sits outside the fee, you hear it from us before we start, never on an invoice afterwards.
If it is not working You can pause or cancel at any time, in writing. No notice period, no exit fee, no lock-in. Cancelling stops all future billing immediately. A month already started is not refunded, and you keep our full attention until the end of it.
Whatever we built for you is yours. In your last paid month we hand over the code with its full history, move your accounts and credentials into your name, and leave you a written runbook for each build: how it deploys, what it costs to run, and what breaks first. You get a recorded walkthrough of each major system. Where something of yours sits on infrastructure we share across clients, we set up your own account and move it across, and we tell you straight away if anything has to be rebuilt instead. For thirty days after the engagement ends, email us any question about the handover and we answer it at no cost. That window is for questions, not new build work. We would rather you left with a working machine than felt stuck with us.
One note on how we talk about the work We often share the work we do: in our portfolio, in our content, and with other prospects weighing up something similar. What that shows is the craft, what was built and how it works. Never your numbers, your customer data, or anything sensitive. Named, anonymous, or entirely off the record, your comfort leads, and we settle it together before anything goes out.
Where we go from here Everything above is how we work with every client, so nothing in it is a negotiation you have to have. We are genuinely looking forward to this engagement, and if anything here raises a question, ask it now rather than later. We would much rather answer it today than have you discover it in month three.
Happy to get started whenever you are.
