Tell us what you’re building

Within four business hours, always — and from a named person rather than an autoresponder. If the honest answer needs longer than that to write, you still get a reply inside four hours telling you when the real one is coming.

Yes, and the same day you ask. Say so in the opening line and nothing sensitive needs to go into the form at all: send the shape of the problem, we send the NDA back, and the detail follows once it is signed.

No. Most of the useful briefs we get are a description of something that is not working, written by somebody who is not technical. If you already have a specification we will read it; if you have a paragraph and a deadline, that is enough to start.

Nothing before the contract. The call, the scope, the written estimate and the technical questions along the way are all free, and you can stop after any of them owing us nothing. There is no discovery fee and no deposit to get a number.

We say so in the first reply, and point you at whoever would be better. It costs us a lead and saves you a month, and it is the reason the reply comes from an engineer rather than from somebody paid to close.

Often, and it is a large part of what we do. It starts with an audit of the codebase, the infrastructure and the test coverage, and ends with a written plan of what to fix, what to refactor and what to rebuild — before anybody writes a new feature.

You do, in full, including the repository history and the infrastructure definitions. Handover includes the documentation and the access, and nothing is held back as leverage for a support contract.