SOFTWARE SUBSCRIPTION

With the delivery commitment. Before every cycle we publish a written commitment naming the specific work it covers, you approve it, and the cycle ends with a demo proving it shipped. That's a specific, agreed outcome every cycle, roughly a dozen checkpoints across a six-month term.

Non-functional work (performance tuning, reliability improvements, usability refinements, supportability upgrades) sits in the same backlog and competes for the same commitment as features, so quality attributes get explicit attention at every planning session rather than only when something breaks.

Priority is yours; scope per cycle is ours. You decide what matters most, we decide what honestly fits in the cycle. That division is what keeps the commitment meaningful in both directions.

One independently prioritized line of work with its own backlog, its own stakeholders, and its own definition of done. A product. A migration. An integrations platform. A mobile app.

Two features in the same backlog aren't two workstreams. Two products with two different owners setting two different priorities are. If you find yourself asking us to run a second thing in parallel, that's a Sustained conversation, and we'd rather have it openly and immediately than quietly absorb it and let both slip.

We retired them. Points were a currency you had to be taught before we could talk about your business, and they turned every refinement session into an argument about whether an auth flow was a 5 or an 8. That's estimation theater, and it's exactly what we're supposed to be against.

Workstreams, cycles, and releases are words you already own. Existing clients on a Feature Point agreement stay at their current rate for the remainder of their term and move over at renewal, and the translation is usually straightforward: one workstream at about a release a month is Burst.

Yes, and that's exactly why we stopped selling by the point. Better tooling shows up as more workstreams running in parallel and shorter cycles from idea to production, and both of those are in the tier you're buying.

What we won't do is quote you a multiplier. Nobody can hold "three times faster" honestly, so we'd rather let the concurrency numbers carry the claim.

For a long-horizon, fully staffed product organization, sometimes you should, and we'll tell you that.

For everything else, the honest answer is that you can't hire this team for six months. Covering the same lifecycle internally means an engineer, an architect, a business analyst, a QA engineer, and someone to run the cadence, most of them at fractions you can't actually buy. Burst starts in about two weeks rather than five months, carries no recruiting risk, and ends without severance. The comparison that matters isn't our rate against a contractor's. It's our rate against what the equivalent internal team costs you fully loaded, and how long it takes you to get there.

Because you're not buying twice the concurrency. You're buying presence. Sustained is a named team allocated to you every cycle, same-business-day responses, a delivery lead who knows your business, and releases whenever you're ready rather than once a month. The second workstream is the smaller half of what changes.

We'll tell you exactly what's covered and exactly who's accountable, but we don't sell headcount. Our pods are small and senior by design, and a single person now carries work that used to be handed across four desks, so a head count tells you very little about what you'll actually get.

What we do commit to is coverage and accountability: the full lifecycle from discovery through production support with no gaps for you to fill, and a named person who owns the delivery commitment and who you escalate to.

Yes, at the start of any billing month. Upgrades take effect immediately; downgrades take effect at the end of the committed term. Many clients start on Burst with one workstream and move to Sustained the moment a second line of work appears.

Infrastructure sits on its own line and moves independently. You can change what your platform needs without touching your delivery tier, and the other way around.

Separately from your delivery tier, and only after we understand what your platform actually has to do. Every engagement includes a production-ready baseline: hosting, a database that is backed up, fast delivery to your users wherever they are, automated deployment, and monitoring on the paths that matter. That's in the delivery tier.

Above that line, the answer depends on your business: how many regions, how quickly you have to recover, which compliance controls you're audited against, what uptime you're willing to pay for. We size that with you during Discovery, price it, and put it on the agreement as its own line, then revisit it as your traffic and stakes change. We keep it separate deliberately: bundling infrastructure into the delivery tier hides what the platform really costs.

Because team count, program duration, compliance scope, on-site requirements, and ramp profile all move the number materially. Pricing an Embedded program is an output of discovery, not an input to it. A number quoted before we understand the shape either underprices the work or scares off a good fit. Give us an hour to scope it and you'll get a real figure.

Only the rate and the notice period. Every tier delivers exactly the same capacity, coverage, and quality standards on either term. The six-month rate is our standard price; month-to-month carries a premium because you're buying optionality: $17,500 instead of $15,000 on Burst, $30,000 instead of $25,000 on Sustained. Over a year that premium is about two months of fees.

A six-month runway also lets us build the architecture that's right for two years instead of optimizing for the next thirty days. That said, month-to-month is the right call if you're validating an idea or working against uncertain funding, and you can move onto a term later. Infrastructure is priced separately and isn’t affected by which term you choose.

On month-to-month, you can pause or cancel at the end of any month. No notice required. On a six-month term we ask for 30 days' notice, and the pause takes effect at the end of the committed term, though we'll always talk through the situation with you.

Either way, your code, infrastructure, and documentation stay yours, and when you're ready to resume we pick up right where we left off.

You do. 100%. Every line of code, every pipeline configuration, every piece of infrastructure is yours from day one. We build on your repositories using your accounts.

We integrate AI tools across the entire SDLC, from requirements analysis and code generation to automated testing, code review, and documentation. The practical effect is that a small senior pod can carry more parallel work with less handoff, which is why we sell concurrency and presence rather than a speed multiplier.