What makes a project bigger or smaller
Two projects with the same name can be very different in size. "An ordering system" can be one screen where your team logs sales, or a portal with customers, inventory, invoicing and delivery. What weighs most:
- How many systems yours has to talk to. Each one, whether a CRM, an ERP, a payment provider or a store, is another part to build and test.
- Who uses it and what each person can see. A system where everyone sees everything is simpler than one where each role sees only its part, with a record of who changed what.
- The data you already have. Moving years of spreadsheets or an old system takes cleanup, checking and a rule for every odd case.
- Phones and spotty connections. If it has to work on a phone, or keep working offline, there's more screen and sync work.
- Your business rules. Calculations, exceptions and approvals that live in someone's head have to be found, written down and tested.
Why the full price comes after the diagnostic
Before anyone understands how your business runs, a price for the whole project is a guess. Either it's padded to cover the risk, or it starts low and grows along the way.
So the first paid step is the diagnostic: a 1 to 2 week study, at a fixed price agreed up front, that sets the scope and the price. You get your process mapped, the scope in writing, what's left out, and the price of each stage. With that in hand, you decide whether to go on, with us or with someone else. The document is yours.
How paying a studio in Brazil works
Contracts are in English, and invoices go out from Brazil in US dollars, from a registered company. You pay in your own currency, and the exchange happens on our side.
You pay per stage, not upfront. Each stage runs 1 to 2 weeks and has a fixed price agreed before it starts. A small first payment opens the work, and each next payment comes after you've seen the stage working and accepted it against criteria written before it started.
That way you're never paying far ahead of what you've received. And at the end of any stage, either side can stop. You keep everything you paid for, documented.
What it costs to keep running
Two costs follow launch. Hosting, which your company pays straight to the cloud provider from its own account. And monthly support, which is optional.
Bug fixes are free for the first 60 days. After that, support is there if you want it, at a fixed monthly price with a written response time. Hosting and support both show up in the diagnostic, before you decide anything.
Keeping the cost down
- Start with the part of the process that hurts most today. The rest comes in later stages, if it still makes sense.
- Connect the tools you already pay for instead of replacing them. Often the problem is typing the same data into two systems, not the systems.
- Buy off-the-shelf what is standard. If an existing product fits, the diagnostic says so, and the recommendation is to buy it.
What yours would cost
Cost depends on the size of the problem. We talk numbers in the first call, which takes 30 minutes and is free, with no commitment.
You don't need a scope ready. A couple of lines about what's slowing your team down is enough.