H,D.Loading
Most agencies will not publish this, because publishing it makes it checkable. That is the reason to publish it.
We write down what the first phase includes, and — more usefully — what it does not. Then we quote a number against that document, and the number holds.
If something turns up mid-phase that changes the scope, we stop and tell you before the work happens. You decide whether it goes in now, goes in later, or does not go in. What does not happen is a bigger invoice explaining itself after the fact.
Not a written update. A link you can open on your phone and show to somebody else.
This is mostly a protection for you. A project that has produced nothing clickable in a fortnight is in trouble, and the whole point of a weekly link is that you find that out in week two rather than month four. It also means the thing gets used while it is being built, which is when feedback is still cheap.
The links, the board, the files and the invoices all live in one place: a portal we built for exactly this, and you get a login to it on day one.
Your GitHub organisation, your hosting account, your database. Not ours with a handover promised at the end of the project.
The practical effect is that you can replace us at any point and lose nothing except us. That is uncomfortable to write on a sales page and it is the single most useful thing we can tell you, because it is the difference between a supplier and a dependency.
If the first phase does not go well, you are not committed to the second. No penalty, no clawback, and everything built up to that point stays yours and stays deployed.
We would rather lose the rest of the project than argue our way through it. Most agency relationships fail somewhere in the first eight weeks, and both sides usually know it before either says so.
A call. Twenty minutes, no deck. You describe what you are trying to build; we ask the questions that decide whether it is two weeks or two months. If it is not work we should take, we say so here.
A written scope: what is in, what is out, what we are assuming, and the number. You read it, argue with it, and we adjust it before anyone starts.
Building, with a link at the end of each week, posted to your portal alongside the board and the milestones. Repository and infrastructure in your accounts from the first commit, so you can watch it happen rather than take our word for it.
Something real, deployed, in use. Then you decide whether there is a phase two — with us or without us.
( nobody has ever enjoyed week zero )
We built it after the first few projects, because progress reports written for the client are always slightly kinder than the board. So you get the board. One private workspace for your company, invite-only, with everything a project produces in it.
Every task, in the column it is actually in. We work from this board, not from a copy of it made to look good for you.
The written scope broken into the pieces it will ship in, each with a date and a state. When one slips, it slips visibly.
The URL from each Friday's demo, kept, so you can go back and see how far the thing has moved.
Briefs, designs, exports and anything you send us, in one private place rather than across three email threads.
Every invoice against the milestone it belongs to, so the number on it is never a surprise.
Invite whoever needs to see it. Nobody outside your company can find your workspace, and there is no public sign-up.
It depends on the scope, which is why we quote against a written document rather than publishing a rate card. What we can tell you before any of that: the first phase has one number, that number is fixed, and you will see it before any work starts.
You tell us and we re-quote that piece. Small things are absorbed. Anything that moves the scope meaningfully gets priced and agreed before it gets built, so the invoice never contains a surprise.
Yes. We will look at it first and tell you honestly what shape it is in, including if the honest answer is that a rewrite would be cheaper than the rescue. That assessment is worth having even if you do not hire us.
Through your portal. Every client gets a private workspace on portal.honestlydecent.dev with the board, the milestones, the weekly links, the files and the invoices. Nothing in it is a summary written for you; it is the same board we work from, so what you see is what is actually happening.
Staff augmentation — renting out developers to work under someone else's manager. Fragments of a project someone else has scoped, where we would be responsible for a piece without control of the whole. And crypto, gambling, and adtech.
Twenty minutes, and you will leave it knowing roughly what the first phase would involve — whether or not you hire us. Or read the case studies first.